How can I adapt a regex pattern for VBA

Question

I am trying to remove a specific string of text using regex and have the following which works on regex101.com however i understand that VBA has some nuances when using regex and the pattern i have doesn't seem to work at all.

the pattern which i validated is in the code below, If possible i would also like to combine it with the below (designed to remove html tags) "\<.*?>" this does work but i currently run a separate regex.replace function to remove this.

Dim regEx As Object , str As String
Set regEx = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")

With regEx
  '.Pattern = "<a\b([^>""']|""[^""]*""|'[^']*')+class=""changed-by"">.*?<\/a>"
'.pattern = "\<.*?\>" ' this is the second pattern i use to remove html tages which works
  .Global = True 'If False, would replace only first
  .IgnoreCase = False
  .MultiLine = False
End With

str = some text here <a href="/instrument/2014/36.pdf" target="_blank" title="2014/36 - 01/07/2014" class="changed-by">1</a> some text here
Debug.Print regEx.Replace(str, "")

Answer 1

If you are going to use the Replace function, I think you need some output parameters, replacing what you find with "" will always return "" . This is what I came up with, I'm not sure if the Regex is any better then yours really, but it works in VBA. The main difference is the first and last group that I added to extract the all the text.

Dim RegEx As New RegExp
Dim Value As String

RegEx.IgnoreCase = True
RegEx.Pattern = "(.*?)<a\b(?:""[^""]*?""|'[^']*?'|[^>]*?)+>([^<]*?)<\/a\b.*?>(.*)"
Value = "some text here <a href=""/instrument/2014/36.pdf"" target=""_blank"" title=""2014/36 - 01/07/2014"" class=""changed-by"">1</a> some text here"
Debug.Print RegEx.Replace(Value, "$1$2$3")

The other option is that you just use the Execute function and pull the text out of the respective groups.

Dim Col As MatchCollection
Dim i As Long
Set Col = RegEx.Execute(Value)
With Col
    For i = 0 To .Count - 1
        With .Item(i)
            Debug.Print .SubMatches(0) & .SubMatches(1) & .SubMatches(2)
        End With
    Next
End With