I have a ton of strings I am parsing out and the only problem I have
is knowing whats a date and whats a special chr in a text field.

##/##/## is a date and so is #/#/## while bob/fred/mary is not.

so I checked and its ok for me to just replace all the non date / with
an underscore.
This way I can populate a table with the date and comment I pull out
of each memo field.

replace sounds nice but how do I check and see if the chr in front of
or behind the / is a number or a " " or a chr?

is this the best way to go?

sparks wrote:

?IsDate("Mary")
False
? IsDate("12/1/2008")
True

So...
strVar = "Mary"
? IIF(IsDate(strVar),strVar,"_")
_
strVar = "12/1/2008"
? IIF(IsDate(strVar),strVar,"_")
12/1/2008

Salad's way is simpler and easier, but if you want to test character by
character, the ASCII code of a numeric character is greater than 48 and less
than 58 and the most commonly used blank/space character's ASCII code is 32.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP

"sparks" <sparks (AT) comcast (DOT) net> wrote



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Larry Linson wrote:

I see that if I did
? IsDate("12/ 1/08)
it returns True

If the OP is returning a value to a Date field then
? IIF(isDate("12/ 1/08"),CDate("12/ 1/08"),null)
would work as it converts to a date or a null.

If the field was a string, then maybe
? IIF(isDate("12/ 1/08"),Cstr(CDate("12/ 1/08")),null)
would work as it removes the space by converting to a date then to a string.

The reason I had to do this by looking at each chr was they had done
something like this

01/1/06 asdfdfadfsdff/gggefe 02/2/06 adsf/adf etc
some of these memo fields had 10+ dates with comments after them
some memo fields were full

and their dates 06//02/06 and all kinds of mess like this

I made 1 fcn to check the position of an / and the previous chr to
make sure it was a number.
then if not I had to pass the string to a replace fcn to replace that
one chr with the _ if it was found to not be a date.
looping thru and chopping the string and writing a date and a comment
to the new table along with the correct ID

so I had 01/1/06 asdfdfadfsdff/gggefe 02/2/06 adsf/adf
write ID 02/2/06 adsf_adf
second pass
01/1/06 asdfdfadfsdff/gggefe
write ID 01/1/06 asdfdfadfsdff_gggefe


it was well overall it was a pain LOL




On Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:04:29 -0700, Salad <oil (AT) vinegar (DOT) com> wrote: