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I need to select and highlight many sentences in which Microsoft Word in which the start word and the end word of the sentence/phrase is the same, but the content in between is different.

How can I achieve this using the find function in word? I want to automate doing this as it should be possible, only thing is I don't know how to achieve this. It would take a very long time for me to manually highlight so many phrases

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Try using regular expressions.

Microsoft has a tutorial here:

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  • this i already know off but could you write the exact expression?
    – rzlines
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 17:50
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    Let me try and figure it out. I don't quite have word available on the PC. It may be something along the lines of (<*>)*\1 in their custom syntax which is not the standard I'm good with
    – Vlueboy
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 18:18
  • the worry is that all the characters that i'm trying to find are special characters so I'll need to escape them too I guess
    – rzlines
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 18:24
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    I tested with my string above, but can't limit to once per line. Special chars can be input or escaped. Multi-highlight searches appear to be impossible without VBA macros like this apparent solution. Either paste the code into a real shell outside Word with real regular expressions (cygwin's bash is useful but huge), or you'll need VBA. Sorry that I couldn't solve the issue.
    – Vlueboy
    Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 20:27

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