Finding strings in text that may be interrupted by certain characters
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I'm working on a task at the moment that involves finding instances of specific words in passages of text. I had a list of about 4000 words but due to the way the text had to be extracted, and for practical reasons, the list had to be made shorter by removing all non-alphabet characters and putting things in lower case.

What I want to do is to run an algorithm to determine whether a specific word is in a passage of text. So, if I was looking for "its" it should also pick out it's, Its and It's.

I know VBA has some Regex support but to my knowledge it's quite basic (I did some Perl in a job last year so I know regex a little). In the program's current form, it uses Instr(), so it finds the exact form of the input. Can anybody else suggest methods to achieve this? Is it hopeless to carry on looking for a solution in excel-vba and just give up and default to Perl?