MS Word web add-in javascript search multiple strings at the same time

Question

I have been able to run the Github project Word-Add-in-JS-Redact successfully. Now, I need to make a change in the code. Need help for that.

At present the code finds multiple occurrences of a single string in a Word Doc and highlights those. But, I need to search multiple strings (can be hard coded inside the js file as well) in the document with a single button click, and highlight those. For example, I want to find both strings 'this' and 'that' in the document at the same time, and highlight them.

The current code, which searches for a single string:

Word.run(function (context) {
                //search string
                var searchInput = "hello";
                // Search the document.
                var searchResults = context.document.body.search(searchInput, {matchWildCards: true});

            // Load the search results and get the font property values.
            context.load(searchResults, "");

            // Synchronize the document state by executing the queued-up commands, 
            // and return a promise to indicate task completion.
            return context.sync()
                .then(function () {
                    var count = searchResults.items.length;
                    // // Queue a set of commands to change the font for each found item.
                    for (var i = 0; i < count; i++) {
                        searchResults.items[i].font.highlightColor = '#FFFF00'; //Yellow            
                    }
                    return count;
                })
                .then(context.sync)
                .then(reportWordsFound);

A couple of ways I have tried so far with no luck:

Ran context.document.body.search(searchInput, in a loop of the search strings, and tried to append the searchResults strings using + and push. This attempt gave an error saying, I cannot add multiple context results to a single object.
I tried to be creative with WildCards operators, but nothing was suitable for this. Many posts are talking about JS regex \(string1|string2/), but this seems to be invalid in Word context.

kajarigd · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-14 00:22:09Z

1

I could solve the problem at last, by creating a parent function, which calls the search function in a loop. My mistake was to create the loop inside the search function itself.

Here is the working code:

function searchStrings(){
    searchString('hello world');
    searchString('Goodbye');
}
RedactAddin.searchStrings = searchStrings;

function searchString(input) {
    // Run a batch operation against the Word object model.
    Word.run(function (context) {
   //...... (same as the original) ...............

answered Nov 14, 2017 at 0:22

kajarigd

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