Regular Expression to match zero or more spaces in Microsoft Word

I hope I'm just missing the obvious here, but how in the world do I match zero or more spaces with Microsoft Word 2010's "Regex" engine?

As a silly example, I want to match all of the following in a capture group:

cowseat grass
cows eat grass
cows eat grass
cows eat grass
cows eat grass

I would normally do (cows\s*eat grass) and be done with it. But I can't see how to match zero or more spaces. I want to capture the whole phrase in a capture group, but I have variable number of spaces.

I've been using this document as a reference.

1 Answer

The document you linked to shows that Microsoft's "regular expressions" aren't really regular expressions at all; they're a bizarre hybrid (bastard child, rather) of shell-style globbing () and true regular expressions.

Since the glob syntax makes use of the * character as a synonym for the regex .*, and Microsoft decided (as mentioned in a comment) to make @ equivalent to the regex quantifier + instead of * (which is stupid since a+ is equivalent to aa* for any atom a, making + unnecessary), it looks like you're out of luck.

My personal opinion is that (1) this is stupid and (2) calling these patterns "regular expressions" is misleading at best, but unfortunately I don't see any way around this except for abandoning Word in favor of a tool that properly supports regex. (Though I suppose in theory you could try to parse the xml-ish format of the docx file itself, extract the text, and then apply your regex....)