{"id":2695,"date":"2016-03-18T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/home2\/bm8qcmjy\/public_html\/blog\/?page_id=2695"},"modified":"2016-03-18T12:01:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T12:01:36","slug":"search-and-replace-text-in-an-open-xml-wordprocessingml-document","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/blog\/search-and-replace-text-in-an-open-xml-wordprocessingml-document\/","title":{"rendered":"Search and Replace Text in an Open XML WordprocessingML Document"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A reoccurring question around Open XML is how to search and replace text in a word-processing document. There have been several attempts at presenting example code to do this, however, until now I have not seen any examples that correctly implement this. This post presents some example code that implements a correct algorithm to search and replace text.<\/p>\n

The first challenge is handle the case when the text you are searching for spans runs with different formatting. A simple example will demonstrate the problem. You want to replace \u2018Hello World\u2019 with \u2018Hi World\u2019. If, in the document, the word \u2018World\u2019 is bolded, then the markup will look something like this:<\/p>\n

<w:p><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 <\/span><w:r><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><w:t<\/span> xml:space<\/span>=<\/span>\"preserve\"<\/span>><\/span>Hello <\/span><\/w:t><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/w:r><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 <\/span><w:r><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><w:rPr><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><w:b<\/span> \/><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><\/w:rPr><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span><w:t><\/span>World<\/span><\/w:t><\/span>\r\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/w:r><\/span>\r\n<\/span><\/w:p><\/span><\/pre>\n
Even though the search text spans runs, the algorithm should find the text and replace it. The next challenge is to define exactly the semantics of searching and replacing text if the text that you are searching for spans runs with different formatting. In short, the replaced text takes on the run formatting of the run that contains the first character of the search string. An example makes this clear. In the following sentence, the first four characters of the word \u2018include\u2019 are bolded:<\/p>\n
On the Insert tab, the galleries incl<\/b>ude items.<\/p>\n
If you replace \u2018include\u2019 with \u2018do not include\u2019, then the sentence should be formatted like this:<\/p>\n
On the Insert tab, the galleries do not include<\/b> items.<\/p>\n
The replaced text takes on the formatting of the \u2018i\u2019 character of include, which was bolded.<\/p>\n
Here is a short screen-cast that walks through the algorithm and the code.<\/p>\n