String function for ages

[tom_crisp]

Hi there,

I have an age field in a table that has ages formatted like so:
64y
101y
13y 3m
6m 12d

I wish to make a query so that only the year number is left in the field.

So basically take everything before the 'y', unless there is no 'y', in which case put '0'

Heres how I do it currently in excel:

=VALUE(LEFT(H6,FIND("y",H6)-1))

Any help much appreciated.

Tom.

EDIT
I take it that the 'Iif' function can sort the ages that don't have a 'y', its just the other part I need because FIND apparently doesn't exist in Access.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Try this in a query:

Years: IIf(InStr(1,[Age],"y")=0,0,CInt(Left([Age],InStr(1,[Age],"y")-1)))

Denis

 

[tom_crisp]

Thanks very much Denis that works great. Shame there isn't more similarity between excel and access functions.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Hi Tom,

Glad it worked. I got frustrated the same way, then I noticed that many of the Access functions are almost identical to the VBA functions in Excel but not the worksheet functions. If you have any experience with VBA, that will help. If not, you'll just have to muddle through and find out as much as you can from posts on this Board and other resources on the Net.

Denis

 

[VicRauch]

Denis,
In your line of code,

Years: IIf(InStr(1,[Age],"y")=0,0,CInt(Left([Age],InStr(1,[Age],"y")-1)))

Once you took care of the case of no "years" in the field, rather than doing the Instr, etc., the Val() function would have worked just fine. I'm just always looking for less typing