Grep in Microsoft Word?

Question

Grep in Microsoft Word?

I'd like to pull all lines with a given string from a word document. In unix world... grep does this without a glitch. Windows is less than obvious for me.

Answer 1

With Cygwin (or access to a Linux machine) you could

antiword file.doc | grep "my phrase"

or

catdoc file.doc | grep "my phrase"

There are lots of command-line file format converters out there to grep in a similar fashion.

Purely in-Word solution could be to Ctrl+F (Find), and then Find All - however, I'm not sure if all versions of MS Word have Find All button.

Answer 2

I know this sounds primitive, but what's stopping you from saving the file as .txt and then ripping it apart to your liking.

Answer 3

What does "line" mean in a Word context? The displayed line, which changes if you do anything to the page formatting? The paragraph? Something else?

You can do a bunch of stuff with Word's find-and-replace functions, including changing the formatting and other non-obvious things, but all of them will only act on the find-what text itself, not on any surrounding text.

Answer 4

PowerGREP will do exactly that for you, and fast - but not free. It's worth every penny, though, in my opinion. Plus, there is a 30-day free trial.