Return all text from non contiguous selection

Hi All,

If a non-contiguous range is selected, the command Selection.Text will only return the last block of text added to the selection. I need to be able create a string that contains all the text that has been selected. As an added step I would also ideally like the string to also include some delimiter (space, return, comma) between each of the selected blocks so in this example assume that a user selects the text 'brown' and 'lazy dog' from the text below:

'the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'

Then I would need a to have a string returned something like 'brown lazy dog'

Interestingly the command:

Selection.Copy would copy all the selected text but Selection.Text only returns the last block, in the case of the above example 'lazy dog'

Thanks

Steve Bayliss
STEOLA

Perhaps:

Code:

---

Sub Demo()
Dim DocTmp As Document, StrTmp As String
Selection.Copy
Set DocTmp = Documents.Add(Visible:=False)
With DocTmp
  With .Range
    .Paste
    StrTmp= Split(Replace(Replace(.Text, vbCr, " "), "  ", " "), vbCr)(0)
  End With
  .Close False
End With
Set DocTmp = Nothing
MsgBox StrTmp
End Sub

---

Thanks Paul,

I appreciate you replying.

So there is no way to identify each individual block that is selected?

Is there any other way than using the clipboard? I dont want to overwrite that if there is already something there.

What I don't understand is how selection.copy or selection.font... can work on the full text yet there doesn't seem to be a way to return that text?? seems bizarre there is not a way to easily get the full text or even concatenate the ranges into a single string..

I was was initially looking for something like selection.areas() like excel would expose. ..

i am not over familiar with the Word object model, could I do a .find on the selection using a wildcard to return all the text or something??

If I can't do that I may utilize the clipboard and reset it back to its ogininal value after getting the selection text.




Thanks Steve

The mere fact you can do something via the GUI doesn't mean there's a VBA equivalent. Word isn't Excel, either.

Sure you can identify each selected block. Indeed, that's something I had to address for the code I posted, via:
Split(Replace(Replace(.Text, vbCr, " "), " ", " "), vbCr)(0)
but that's because of how you said you wanted the output represented!!! If I'd used just:
StrTmp = .Text
each 'block' would start on a new line in the message box.