Microsoft Word Wildcards to Find Any Dates of a certain form

Question

I am editing a very large document (~200 pages), with multiple dates on each page. I am looking to use MS Word's wildcard function in the find-and-replace feature to remove these.

Some examples of the dates are as follows: "Monday 1 January 2015", "Tuesday 10 February 2015", "Wednesday 30 March 2015", "Thursday 29 March 2014", ...

The general form is (day of the week) (1 or 2 digit day) (Full month) (year–2014/2015).

I am looking for a specific wildcard expression to match any of these dates.

I understand that for regex, you can search the day of the week as (Monday|Tuesday|Wednesday|...), but upon trying in Word, it doesn't work.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

What format are you wanting to replace with? That will make a difference in how you format the syntax for your search string.

This will find all instances of the format you want, but it won't be terribly useful for replacing with a specific format.

([MTWFS]*day) ([0-9]{1,2}) [ADFJMNOS]{1}*[ehlrty]{1} ([0-9]{4})

If you get back to me with a desired format, maybe I can do something, but I suspect it might actually be faster to just run a few separate individual searches, especially if this is a one-time deal. The following should get the results you want in 5-10 minutes.

Monday > Mon (repeat for all the days of the week)

and

([0-9]{1,2}) January [0-9]{2}([0-9]{2}) > /1 Jan /2 (repeated for all the months

That would yield the format: Mon DD Jan YY