Copmarison loop driving me nuts!

[Ed]

I have a long block of text like this:



L5-D000001^tTEXT^p

L5-D000001^tTEXT^p

L5-D000001^tTEXT^p

L5-D000002^tTEXT^p



(^t is a tab; ^p is a hard return)



I need to compare the first text string ("L5-D000001") of each line with the
first string of the next line until it changes. I've been trying to Select
the first string, copy to the clipboard, and use the clipboard as a string
variable ("strClip") to compare with the next string, looping until the
Selection did not match strClip. When it doesn't match, the code will drop
out of the loop and run some other instructions, after which it will go back
to the first select, copy to clipboard, and compare again until it detects a
single table cell at the end of the document.



This actually did work when I put everything in a table and searched down
the first column, but I've found I can't do that; I have to work with it as
a block of text spanning about 3200 pages. And I just can't get the
comparison loop to work right.



Any and all help is appreciated.



Ed

 

[Dave Lett]

Hi Ed,

Have a look at the articles:

" Delete any paragraph that is an exact duplicate of the preceding
paragraph, using a Range object" at
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/DeleteParaRnge.htm

"Delete any paragraph that is an exact duplicate of the preceding paragraph,
using a Selection object" at
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/DeleteParaSel.htm

These should give you an idea of how to compare consecutive paragraphs until
something changes.

HTH