Lookup and highlight text in cells with wildcard characters

[Halulu]

Hi all,

I have an Excel sheet with aminoacid sequences represented as text. I want to write a script, that finds and highlights a specific motif in the different sequences. The motif is T.[DE] (or T?D|E) meaning that I'm looking for 3 characters beginning with T, the second character is variable and the third character is either a D or an E. E.g. TFE, TGE, TGD etc.

For example, my peptide sequence is SVKVPVGVQMNKYVINGTYDNETKLKITQLL, after running the script it should look like this: SVKVPVGVQMNKYVINGTYDNETKLKITQLL. I dont care whether the motif is marked in bold, color etc.

So as a start, I looked up some scripts with InStr from the internet, which serve their purpose well, as long as you have a normal word without any wildcard characters for the search...since InStr doesn't allow for wildcards. So for example, for the static "TYD" it would work.

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My question is, are there alternatives to ImStr I coud use? If the "either or" [DE] searchterm is a problem I could split the searches into T?D and T?E but I would at least need to use the wildcard ? / . character in the search.
Thanks in advance

[watersev]

hi Halulu, welcome to Excelforum, option, please check attachment, select cells to be searched, press "CTRL+SHIFT+M" or run code "test"(ALT+F8, select "test", press Run)

The code would ask for a pattern to search. The pattern has to be in accordance with regular expressions codex.
Pattern example:
T.[DE] - will match any three symbols pattern starting with T having any symbol (letter or number or other signs) on the second place and ending with D or E letters.

[ragulduy]

I believe the worksheet function search allows wildcards. So maybe something like:

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