Regular Expression

[sl]

So I am new to VB Macros in Excel and I swear I came across some method
called .contains where if a cell contained the string or regular
expression you were searching for it returned a boolean of True or
false if it didn't find it.

Now that I am returning to my notes I can't find it, nor can I find it
in books or on-line.

Has anyone heard of this or is there a better way to check if a cell's
contents conform to a particular pattern?

Thanks!

 

[Harlan Grove]

sl wrote...

So I am new to VB Macros in Excel and I swear I came across some method
called .contains where if a cell contained the string or regular
expression you were searching for it returned a boolean of True or
false if it didn't find it.

Now that I am returning to my notes I can't find it, nor can I find it
in books or on-line.

Has anyone heard of this or is there a better way to check if a cell's
contents conform to a particular pattern?

VBA provides an operator named Like which provides very lightweight
pattern matching. If you want true regular expressions, you could use
[OLE] Automation to access VBScript regular expressions. See the
following article in the archives.

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel.misc/msg/f420fccb662c0f63

 

[Tushar Mehta]

So I am new to VB Macros in Excel and I swear I came across some method
called .contains where if a cell contained the string or regular
expression you were searching for it returned a boolean of True or
false if it didn't find it.

Now that I am returning to my notes I can't find it, nor can I find it
in books or on-line.

Has anyone heard of this or is there a better way to check if a cell's
contents conform to a particular pattern?

Thanks!

In addition to Harlan's suggestion, to use regular expressions in a UDF,
check
http://www.tmehta.com/regexp/
particularly
http://www.tmehta.com/regexp/add_code.htm

--
Regards,

Tushar Mehta
www.tushar-mehta.com
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