Count Characters left of a hyphen

I have a series of job numbers like this

K3444-
K5633-
3434-
3434- A
3434- B
M3456-

I need to count the characters left of the dash and then add a leading space to those that only have 4 characters. It should look something like this:

K3444-
K5633-
  3434-
  3434- A
  3434- B
M3456-

So far (with the help of another thread on this forum) I have been able to figure out how to count all the characters in the textbox and add the spacer with this:

VB Code:

Dim strCharCount As String = txtJobNumber.Text
        strCharCount = RTrim(strCharCount)
        Dim iLength As Integer = strCharCount.Length
        If iLength >= 5 Then
            strCharCount = strCharCount
        ElseIf iLength = 4 Then
            strCharCount = " " & strCharCount
        ElseIf iLength <= 3 Then
            MsgBox("You must use a valid Job Number.", _
                MsgBoxStyle.OKOnly, "Length Error!")
            txtJobName.Clear()
            txtJobNumber.Focus()
            Exit Sub
        End If

How do I modify this to count only the characters left of the - (dash)?

You could Split() the string on the dash as delimiter, giving you an array element like myArray(0) which would contain all characters to the left of the dash. Or as you read in the characters, check them for a dash, but this would probably be less efficient.

Use the "InStr" function:

VB Code:

Dim charCount As Integer = Instr(MyString, "-") - 1

Or use the "IndexOf" method of the string class:

VB Code:

Dim charCount As Integer = MyString.IndexOf("-")

When -1 is returned, the expression was not found.

Thanks to both of you for the reply. I tried it both ways and with a lot of trial and error I finaly resolved it using the Split that salvelinus mentioned.

Just in case someone else would like to see an example of the finished Sub it looks like this:

VB Code:

Dim strCharCount As String = RTrim(txtJobNumber.Text)
        Dim arrCharCount() As String = strCharCount.Split("-")
        Dim iLength As Integer = arrCharCount(0).Length
 
        If iLength >= 5 Then
            strCharCount = strCharCount
            txtJobNumber.Text = strCharCount
        ElseIf iLength = 4 Then
            strCharCount = " " & strCharCount
            txtJobNumber.Text = strCharCount
        ElseIf iLength <= 3 Then
            MsgBox("You must use a valid Job Number.", _
                MsgBoxStyle.OKOnly, "Length Error!")
            txtJobName.Clear()
            txtJobNumber.Focus()
            Exit Sub
        End If