Search text in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets

To search a keyword in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets Search(String) method is used. This method returns the collection of SearchResult objects. For details, see Search Text.

Here are the steps to search a keyword in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial spreadsheet;
Call Search(string) method and obtain the collection of SearchResult objects;
Iterate through the collection and get the position and text.

Search(String) method returns null value if search isn’t supported for the spreadsheet. For example, text extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive Search(String) method returns null. For empty Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet Search(String) method returns an empty collection.

The following example shows how to find a keyword in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Search a keyword:
    IEnumerable<SearchResult> sr = parser.Search("page number");
  
    // Iterate over search results
    foreach(SearchResult s in sr)
    {
        // Print an index and found text:
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("At {0}: {1}", s.Position, s.Text));
    }
}

Search(String, SearchOptions) is used for the advanced search in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets - like search with regular expressions, search by pages etc. SearchOptions parameter is used to customize a search.

Here are the steps to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial spreadsheet;
Instantiate SearchOptions object with the parameters for the search;
Call Search(string, SearchOptions) method and obtain the collection of SearchResult objects;
Iterate through the collection and get the position and text.

The following example shows how to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Search with a regular expression with case matching
    IEnumerable<SearchResult> sr = parser.Search("page number: [0-9]+", new SearchOptions(true, false, true));
    // Iterate over search results
    foreach(SearchResult s in sr)
    {
        // Print an index and found text:
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("At {0}: {1}", s.Position, s.Text));
    }
}

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