title: Excel VBA - Delete Single Character from Cell without losing formatting of remainder of cell contents
body: <p>I am trying to delete the first occurrence of "&lt;" and ">" in a cell without losing formatting of the remainder of the cell's contents.</p>
  
  <p>I have looked in several places here, and other, to no avail.</p>
  
  <p>This is what I am trying to do:</p>
  
  <p>Say "A1" contains the text:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"This is &lt;a&gt; long string with several &lt;occurrences&gt; of a &lt;special&gt; character."
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In any case, What I am trying to do is remove the ">", and in a perfect world the "&lt;", from the first word which contains them while maintaining the bold formatting as well as the "&lt;" and ">" on the next word containing them.</p>
  
  <p>This is ONLY other code executing prior to the code I am having issues with.</p>
  
  <pre><code>inTx = Range("A2").Value
  outTx = Replace(inTx, "Init_Day", Range("A3").Value)
  Range("A2").Value = outTx
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which replaces the <code>&lt;placeholder&gt;</code> text with the actual text, a two digit number in this case.</p>
  
  <p>Here is the code that is not working for me:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SearchString = Range("A2").Value
  Char1 = "&lt;"
  Char2 = "&gt;"
  For i = 1 To Len(SearchString)
      If Mid(SearchString, i, 1) = Char1 Then
          startPos = i
          Exit For
      End If
  Next i
  For i = 1 To Len(SearchString)
      If Mid(SearchString, i, 1) = Char2 Then
          endPos = i
          Exit For
      End If
  Next i
  Range("A2").Characters(startPos, endPos - startPos).Font.Bold = True
  Range("A2").Characters(startPos - 1, 1).Delete
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>All code works fine until I reach the last line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Range("A2").Characters(startPos - 1, 1).Delete
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>then nothing happens.</p>
  
  <p>I've even tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Range("A2").Characters(startPos - 1, 20).Delete
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Still nothing...</p>
  
  <p>I know this should be easy but I can't seem to figure it out.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>