Identifying a String of Characters with Specific Patterns

Question

I need to detect a series of characters within the workbook and highlight the cell.

I am done with the "searching and highlighting" but I am stuck in having my code "identify" the series with the right criteria.

I've heard Regex is a good way to go but I failed miserably.

The series of characters:

• is sometimes full numbers, sometimes with letters
• is sometimes the only value within the cell, sometimes with other strings
• has 16 characters/digits
• is sometimes written in the following patterns:
  straight string "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", groups of 4s like a cc number with hyphens or spaces "XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX" or
  "XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX", or groups of 8s (again with hyphens or spaces) "XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX"

Answer 1

You can use Replace and InStr:

CellText = "some string XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX, etc."
FindText = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

CleanText = Replace(Replace(CellText, "-", ""), " ", "")
Found = (InStr(1, CleanText, FindText, vbTextCompare) > 0)