»Chip Pearson« wrote:
Marcus,

Here's some code from my standard library that will do what you want, if I
understand your question properly:

You didn't, but I found a way in fact.

"ParamArray Delimiters() As Variant" is the trick...

then I can just specify the different delimiters in the function call.
Also...

Function MakeArray(ParamArray arr() As Variant) As Variant()
MakeArray = arr
End Function

looks like a useful utility function. Is there a conversion the other
way round, like "apply" in many languages? Think of it like this:

Dim args(3) As Variant
args(1) = "Hello World"
args(2) = 4
args(3) = 2
result = Apply(Mid, args)
' result is now "lo"

In other words, what I am looking for is a function with the property:

For each argument list ... and each function f,

f(...) = Apply(f, MakeArray(...))

hold.

From this, we can conclude:

Apply(MakeArray, somelist)
= Apply(MakeArray, MakeArray(items in somelist separated by comma))
= MakeArray(items in somelist separated by comma)
= somelist

so the other inversion does not need to be specified too.


Actually, what I originally wanted to have is a simpler regex-like way
to extract data out of strings, like:

Dim s As String
s = UnDelimit(htmlpage, "Number of items:<", "<td", "</td")(3)

Let htmlpage then be "...<thNumber if items:</th<td42</td...", then
UnDelimit would return the following list:

MakeArray("...<th", "/th", "42", "...")

Think of it as an equivalent to Perl's

my $s = ($htmlpage =~ m!^.*?Number of items:<.*?<td(.*?)</td.*$!);

Of course, the initial and final ^.*? or .*$ can be left out as they are
implicitly given in Perl REs. It's actually a simple function based on a
series of InStr.