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What are the limitations for bookmark names in Microsoft Word?

Answer 1

+2 A:

If you are familiar with regular expressions, I would say it is

^(?!\d)\w{1,40}$

Where \w refers to the range of Unicode word characters, which also contain the underscore and the digits from 0-9.

Expressed differently: The name must start with a word character (but not a digit), then any Unicode word character may follow up to an overall length of 40 characters. Word characters explicitly exclude white space and punctuation of any kind.

As divo states in the comments, bookmarks with names beginning with an underscore are treated as "hidden". It it is not possible to create bookmarks that begin with an underscore via the user interface, but you can do it through "Bookmarks.Add"

Tomalak 2009-05-12 14:05:53

+1, Plus that bookmarks whose name begins with '_' are treated as hidden.

0xA3 2009-05-12 14:11:48

That would lead us to "^(_|\w)[\w\d]{0,39}$"

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-12 14:29:49

@Maxime Vernier: "_" is traditionally part of "\w".

Tomalak 2009-05-12 14:30:49

@divo: I actually failed to create a bookmark that begins with "_" in Word 2003...

Tomalak 2009-05-12 14:33:05

@Tomalak: I have checked the meaning of \w on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions and it seems \d is part of \w too. I would say "^[_A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]{0,39}$"- starts with an underscore or a letter- then at most 39 letters or digits

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-12 14:43:05

@Tomalak: I cannot create a bookmark that begins with "_" in Word 2000 or 2003. It should be possible with the API though.

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-12 14:49:14

You can have underscores within the name. Rules: 1. starts with an underscore or a letter, 2. followed with at most 39 letters, digits or underscores.^[_A-Za-z]\w{0,39}$

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-12 15:06:41

Maxime Vernier: You are right - \d is part of \w. I'll reformulate the Regular expression. :)

Tomalak 2009-05-12 15:12:36

@Maxime Vernier: I refer to \w instead of "A-Z" because word characters from foreign languages are explicitly allowed. You may create Hebrew bookmarks, or Chinese ones, for example.

Tomalak 2009-05-12 15:28:12

@Tomalak: I have trouble reading your last rexexp ^(?!\d)\w{1,40}$.For me it means starts with an optional character (any character: .) except \d. Since we want \w minus \d, it catches more things than needed and it can match strings of length 41. How about ^[_A-Za-z]\w{0,39}$ instead?

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-12 16:02:50

The regular expression contains of a so-called "negative zero-width assertion" (?!\d) meaning "a position not followed by a digit", and 1-40 "word characters". This special construct is necessary because \w{1,40} would allow a string that *begins* with a digit. Your regex would force the first character to be in the A-Z range, but in fact many more characters than this are legal. My variant allows them all.

Tomalak 2009-05-12 21:55:21

I understand the "negative zero-width assertion" now. My regexp is ascii only, yours is unicode thus better. Thanks to both of you for your help.

Maxime Vernier 2009-05-13 08:33:46

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What are the limitations for bookmark names in Microsoft Word?

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