Hyphens and comparisons

[Jackeb]

Here is a good one..

I have an array filled with individual strings, the strings are something like this... A1D-WS-2346-78 and I would like to make the string like this A1DWS234678. Please be aware that the hyphens are in variable places and there are a variable number of hyphens.

My ultimate aim is to compare two strings, call one the master and one the subject. The master is the one above, it contains a lot of information about a part, however the subject also contains the same information but only part of it, I need to compare the subject to every one of the master strings and find out if it appears anywhere within the master string...

both ave hyphens but if i can remove the hyphens from both ten I can do a strait text comparison...

One step at a time, I am trying to remove the hyphens and then I wil try and tackle the comparison, but any help on that would be very... and i mean very greatfuly recieved!!

Cheers

Ed

PS, talk about summing diagonally.... this one hads gotta take the biscuit!! arrgghh

[Aladin Akyurek]

On 2002-04-17 03:05, Jackeb wrote:
Here is a good one..

I have an array filled with individual strings, the strings are something like this... A1D-WS-2346-78 and I would like to make the string like this A1DWS234678. Please be aware that the hyphens are in variable places and there are a variable number of hyphens.

My ultimate aim is to compare two strings, call one the master and one the subject. The master is the one above, it contains a lot of information about a part, however the subject also contains the same information but only part of it, I need to compare the subject to every one of the master strings and find out if it appears anywhere within the master string...

both ave hyphens but if i can remove the hyphens from both ten I can do a strait text comparison...

One step at a time, I am trying to remove the hyphens and then I wil try and tackle the comparison, but any help on that would be very... and i mean very greatfuly recieved!!

Cheers

Ed

PS, talk about summing diagonally.... this one hads gotta take the biscuit!! arrgghh

[1]

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH(B1,A1))

returns TRUE if the substring in B1 is a substring of the string in A1.

[2]

=SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","")

removes hyphens if they exist in the string in A1.

[3]

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH(SUBSTITUTE(B1,"-",""),SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","")))

will return TRUE if the de-hyphenated substring in B1 is a substring of the de-hyphenated string in A1.

Not sure whether you need de-hyphenating at all.

[Jackeb]

sounds good... all i have to do now is put that into VBA and i am sorted... cheere,

and i do need to dehyphenate... unfortunatly