Spotting missing brackets in Word?

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When using brackets in Word, I often manage to forget to include the closing bracket, especially if it is quite a long sentence.

Does anyone please know if there is a macro one could run, or some other way, for spotting this problem – perhaps by checking that there are as many opening brackets as there are closing brackets in a document?

Thanks

V

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It’s irritating that the grammer checker doesn’t seem to pick these up.

One approach might be to find the opening punctuation — ( or [ or { as the case may be — and then create a range to the next instance of the same character, or to the end of the document, whichever comes first. Then check the range for the expected closing punctuation.

About 2 minutes into trying to write this, it occurred to me to run a search. Maybe something like this? Checking for Matching Parentheses (Microsoft Word)

—

Okay, here’s my take on it:

Code:

Sub CheckPairedPuncTEST()
CheckPairedPunc ActiveDocument.Content, "(", ")"
End Sub

Sub CheckPairedPunc(rngStory As Word.Range, strStart As String, strEndPattern As String)
Dim rngTemp As Word.Range, lngChars As Long, regEx As Object, regExMatches As Object
Set rngTemp = ActiveDocument.Range(rngStory.Start, rngStory.Start)
Do
    ' Set start of range on next strStart
    lngChars = rngTemp.MoveStartUntil(strStart)
    If lngChars = 0 Then Exit Do
    ' Set end of range to character just before next "("
    rngTemp.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
    rngTemp.MoveEnd wdCharacter, 1
    lngChars = rngTemp.MoveEndUntil(strStart)
    If lngChars = 0 Then    ' Set end of range to end of content
        rngTemp.MoveEnd wdStory
        rngTemp.MoveEnd wdCharacter, -1
    End If
    If (regEx Is Nothing) Then Set regEx = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    regEx.Pattern = strEndPattern
    regEx.Global = True
    Set regExMatches = regEx.Execute(rngTemp.Text)
    If regExMatches.Count  1 Then
        rngTemp.Select
        If MsgBox("Unbalanced punctuation in the selection. Stop to fix?", vbExclamation + vbYesNo) = vbYes Then
            GoTo cleanup
        End If
    End If
    rngTemp.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
Loop
cleanup:
Set rngTemp = Nothing
Set regEx = Nothing
Set regExMatches = Nothing
End Sub

This assumes you have the VBScript library on your computer, but you do not need to add a VBA Reference (the code uses late binding).

Also, the end pattern for ) requires a backslash because ) is a special character in regular expressions. That’s not so user friendly, it would be nicer if the procedure just handled that detail for you, but it’s what I can do at the moment.

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At its simplest you could use something like:

Code:

Sub BalanceCheck()
Dim Rng As Range
' Turn Off Screen Updating
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Set Rng = ActiveDocument.Range
With Rng
  'Validate content
  If Len(Replace(.Text, "{", vbNullString))  Len(Replace(.Text, "}", vbNullString)) Then
    MsgBox "Unmatched brace '{}' pairs in the document.", vbCritical + vbOKOnly, "Error!"
    Exit Sub
  End If
  If Len(Replace(.Text, "«", vbNullString))  Len(Replace(.Text, "»", vbNullString)) Then
    MsgBox "Unmatched chevron '«»' pairs in the document.", vbCritical + vbOKOnly, "Error!"
    Exit Sub
  End If
  If Len(Replace(.Text, "[", vbNullString))  Len(Replace(.Text, "]", vbNullString)) Then
    MsgBox "Unmatched square bracket '[]' pairs in the document.", vbCritical + vbOKOnly, "Error!"
    Exit Sub
  End If
  If Len(Replace(.Text, "(", vbNullString))  Len(Replace(.Text, ")", vbNullString)) Then
    MsgBox "Unmatched parenthesis '()' pairs in the document.", vbCritical + vbOKOnly, "Error!"
    Exit Sub
  End If
End With
Set Rng = Nothing
' Restore Screen Updating
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

Beyond that, code could be added to loop though each paragraph for each of the unmatched symbol-pair scenarios, stopping when it found a mismatch. Of course, one has to allow for the possibility that a valid paragraph-level mis-match might occur with the counterpart to an opening symbol being in a later paragraph.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Many thanks to you both. I’ll give these macros a go and report back!

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I’ve tried them both and they work well – thank you so much.

I have to admit a preference for the first macro – thanks jscher2000 – as it highlights each error as it finds it, giving one the option to correct or not, and does not fail the )( test – ie paired brackets but the wrong way round! Great work.

Thanks again.

PS Wonder why Word hasn’t built a similar test into their grammar checker (although perhaps the 2007/10 versions do?)

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PS Wonder why Word hasn’t built a similar test into their grammar checker (although perhaps the 2007/10 versions do?)

Not in Word 2010. Maybe in the next version…

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jscher2000

PS I’ve made one small enhancement to your macro. I’ve added an extra line – MsgBox (“Finished!”) – above ‘End Sub’ so that, even when there is nothing to correct, you know when the macro has finished running.

V

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