Regular Expression Construction Help[RESOLVED]

I'm using VBA for excel, and Im facing a problem.
I have a string, for example abcde

If the string (data in a cell) is as above, then its OK. Sometimes, the data recieved might have some apostrophes (") at the beginning or end. To capture this, I want to pattern match against every cell to account for the following strings

"abcde
abcde"
"abcde"

In all the above, the output shud be abcde. I found a lot of websites detailing out pattern matching for VB, but, I believe that its not the same for VBA for excel. For example..." are referred to as chr(34) as I recently dicovered.

If someone could help me build the regex im looking for...I'd really appreciate it!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by perlmonk

I'm using VBA for excel, and Im facing a problem.
I have a string, for example abcde

If the string (data in a cell) is as above, then its OK. Sometimes, the data recieved might have some apostrophes (") at the beginning or end. To capture this, I want to pattern match against every cell to account for the following strings

"abcde
abcde"
"abcde"

In all the above, the output shud be abcde. I found a lot of websites detailing out pattern matching for VB, but, I believe that its not the same for VBA for excel. For example..." are referred to as chr(34) as I recently dicovered.

If someone could help me build the regex im looking for...I'd really appreciate it!!

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If you need to refer to a (") character inside of a literal string surrounded by (") characters, you can use 2 (") back-to-back which will allow a single (") inside of a string:

VB Code:

"This has 2 ""quotes"" inside it."

Thanks for the suggestion...I will try it right away...do you have any suggestion as to how to pattern match any character after the ("), whether integer or character?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by perlmonk

Thanks for the suggestion...I will try it right away...do you have any suggestion as to how to pattern match any character after the ("), whether integer or character?

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Using pattern matching implies a formatted input as an input argument to either an operator (Like, +, etc..) or a named function.

Is this what you are doing? Please explain more.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dave Sell

Using pattern matching implies a formatted input as an input argument to either an operator (Like, +, etc..) or a named function.

Is this what you are doing? Please explain more.

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The input will be in the form of some data in an excel cell. This alphanumeric data, for the most part would be formatted correctly (meaning that the data would be as is, without any quotation marks or anything)...but sometimes the data might have quotation marks in the beginning, end or both...for example, if abc represents the correctly formatted data..the incorrect formatted data might be "abc or abc" or "abc"

I want to trap these quotation marks, if present, and remove them.

I hope this explains my problem..please let me know!! Thanks a bunch :)

do you think adding the following reference to my list of references would help?

Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5...I found this in the References selection under tools.

Also, found more info on this at http://visualbasic.about.com/od/usin...l/blregexa.htm

Quote:

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Originally Posted by perlmonk

do you think adding the following reference to my list of references would help?

Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5...I found this in the References selection under tools.

Also, found more info on this at http://visualbasic.about.com/od/usin...l/blregexa.htm

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Probably, but I've never used it.

yea...this didnt work...am pretty disappointed.

any suggestions??

Quote:

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Originally Posted by perlmonk

yea...this didnt work...am pretty disappointed.

any suggestions??

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You just have to use your

VB Code:

Instr()

function.

You may want to post a thread in the VB.NET forum since more users would
familiar with RegEx over there. ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

You may want to post a thread in the VB.NET forum since more users would
familiar with RegEx over there. ;)

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Hey thanks everyone...I'll try the Instr function, but im sure there is a shorter way by using regex.

I'll post my prob in .NET section as well...thanks once again!! :thumb:

I fixed the issue using the replace function....sweeeeeeet .
thanks everyone :wave: