document searching - Xtreme Visual Basic Talk

02-01-2003, 01:41 PM

TylerC

Guest

Posts: n/a

document searching

Hi,

I don't know if this is possible using VB but I figured I'd atleast look into it (I don't really know ANYTHING about VB programming).

What I need to do is create a program of some sort to search the contents of a long list of MS Word files and display the names of the files with contents matching the search criteria.

My initial idea was to try and use MS Access to do this, I'm still pursuing it as an option but I think that VB will be easier to deploy to the rest of the members of my small organization when the project is completed.

Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

Tyler

02-01-2003, 02:33 PM

GavinO

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Posts: 3,120

Well, the easiest (and least efficient) method would be something like this:

Code:

for i=1 to len(ofthefile)
 if instr(filetext$,searchtext$) then file_is_good
next i

Of course, that just finds a particular string in order. If you want to have all of a bunch of words not necessarily in order, you need to do this for the if:

Code:

if instr(filetext$,searchtext$(1)) and instr(filetext$,searchtext$(2) ... then file_is_good

To do whole word search, you can put spaces on the beginning and end of words, and hope that they aren't at the end of a sentence. You could also do an or search for spaces at end or punctuation at end, or replace all punctuation with spaces before the search. You could probably also drive Word with your program to do the search with the preexisting search capabilities of Word.

Do note that this is the easiest to code, yet crudest, least efficient search routine I could come up with in 3 minutes. A search of the forum or google will probably give you a combnation of brilliant VB code and API calls.

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