Matching literal text "???" in Word 2010 field code IF statement

[sabrinax]

I'm using Word 2010 and merging in text from another piece of software, an automated document processor I have limited control over. The processor replaces null values with ??? before merging them into a Word template. I would like to use Word field code conditionality to test whether given text equals literal ???. Using the characters as-is also matches if there's a three digit/letter value in the field, and I haven't been able to successfully escape the question marks so that they mean just the character ?. I've tried using backslashes, QUOTE, SET and SYMBOL functions, and am out of ideas.

The conditional I'm using looks like this, where REFNO is the text provided by the document processor:
{ IF {REFNO} = "???" "blank" "Not blank"}

How can I match this correctly?

 

[macropod]

You could use a compound field coded as:
{IF{={IF{REFNO}> "'>>>'" 1 0}*{IF{REFNO}< "@@@" 1 0}}= 0 "not "}blank

Note: The field brace pairs (i.e. '{ }') for the above example are all created in the document itself, via Ctrl-F9 (Cmd-F9 on a Mac); you can't simply type them or copy & paste them from this message. Nor is it practical to add them via any of the standard Word dialogues. Note also the inner pair of ' characters in "'>>>'".

 

[sabrinax]

Fantastic, thank you so much! That's a clever workaround, the less than/greater than.