Counting characters (XP/2K)

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I might be reinventing the wheel , but I would like to count the number of timers a particular character appears in a doc. I wrote the following code:
Public Sub howMany()
Dim intHow As Integer
Dim strWhat As String
Dim intCount As Integer
Dim myresult As Integer

strWhat = InputBox(“Which character would you like to search for?”, “Search character “)
intHow = 0
intCount = 0

With ActiveDocument.Content.find
.ClearFormatting

Do While .Execute(FindText:=strWhat, Forward:=True, _
Format:=True) = True
intHow = intHow + 1

End If
Loop
End With
x = MsgBox(“The character ” & strWhat & ” appears ” & intHow & ” times”, vbInformation, “Results”)
End Sub

It works, but if the character appears more than 1000 times my computer hangs.
Is there something that does this, or a better way to do it. I thought maybe if I break the doc up and count a paragraph ata time, then it will not hang.
Thanks

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Zave,

The integer data type cannot hold a number larger than 32,767 – don’t know if that is relevant since you are getting the problem when you reach 1,000, but in any case you might try replacing all of the “Integer”s with “Long”s.

Gary

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For a different approach you could look at the article subtitled How to find out how many occurrences there are of a particular word in a document on the Word MVP FAQ Site

StuartR

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Hi Zave,

You have a redundant “End If” in the “Do While .Execte …Loop” which might be responsible for the hangs.

Two alternate approaches that may be quite a bit faster:

Get the count of characters, replace the character with nothing, then count the charactes again. Use Application.Undo to undo the changes (… this is not for the faint-hearted ).

Or get the whole main story in a string (myString = ActiveDocument.Content.Text), and use the Replace function to replace the character with nothing (again taking the difference in string length before and after).

It takes about the same time to get the document text into a string variable as it takes to search the document once using “Find/Replace (Replace All)”.
But if you need the counts of different characters, the Replace on the string will be much faster than “Find/Replace”.

Klaus

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this works if anyone is interested. It is based on the helpful input of everyone who responded:

Public Sub howMany()

Dim strfind As String
Dim lngMany As Long
Dim lngBefore As Long
Dim lngAfter As Long
Dim lnghow As Long

strfind = InputBox(“Which Character would you like to search for?”, “Count”)

‘ this protects the original doc
Selection.WholeStory
Selection.copy
Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)

lngBefore = ActiveDocument.Characters.Count
StatusBar = lngBefore

Selection.find.ClearFormatting
Selection.find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.find
.Text = strfind
.Replacement.Text = strfind & “#”
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchKashida = False
.MatchDiacritics = False
.MatchAlefHamza = False
.MatchControl = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

lngAfter = ActiveDocument.Characters.Count
StatusBar = lngAfter
lnghow = lngAfter – lngBefore
StatusBar = lnghow
x = MsgBox(“The character ” & strfind & ” appears ” & lnghow & ” times”, vbInformation, “Results”)
ActiveDocument.Close (False) ‘to close the temporary doc that you opened.

End Sub

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How about just a Find/Replace. Find the character, replace with itself. You then get a message box that Word completed the search & made xxx replacements. I did this on a several hundred page document on the letter “e” & got 87,625. Just to be on the safe side, I’d make a copy of the document first. (Hate to have a documents without any “eeees”.

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It’s a pretty bad omission that you can’t get the number of replacements with VBA. The number of replacements seems to be displayed with an error handler in the user interface, but the error (5524) can’t be caught in a macro.

I’d hoped there would be a way in XP/2002, since many have complained in the last versions.

Klaus

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The reason I did it with VBA is for a complete novice user, he can get the count easily, without having to open unfamiliar menus and potentially destroying his doc (no eees)

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