Eliminating duplicates from a variant variable
 

When I apply your code below, I get the following error:

User-defined type not defined? How should this variable type be
defined?

Thanks.


Patrick Lee wrote:
One solution is to store your strings as keys for a
Collection or Dictionary (to use the latter, set a
reference in your VBA project to Microsoft Scripting
Runtime) object. Keys for both of these objects have to
be unique.
Personally, I would use a Dictionary object
dim dic1 as Dictionary
Set dic1 = New Dictionary

For iCounter = 1 to lYourNumberOfStrings
dim yourstring as string
' retrieve yourstring depending on iCounter
if not dic1.exists(yourstring) then
' we know that yourstring has not already been added
as a key to the dictionary
dic1.Add yourstring, 1 ' this adds yourstring as a
key and 1 as the value referenced by this key (the value
is not used here so anything will do)

end if
next iCounter

' after this loop, dic1.Keys() is an array going from 0
to dic1.Count -1 with the unique values of your strings

hth

Patrick

-----Original Message-----
I have a variant variable holding string values
How shall eliminate the duplicate strings from this
variable, retaining only one value. Eg: If i have the
element "TOM" twice in that array, i wish to delete one.
which is the most effective way to handle this?

Thanks,
Leo

.

Eliminating duplicates from a variant variable
 

Hi Smokiibear,

Did you set a reference to the Microsoft Scripting Runtime library, as
suggested by Patrick?

If I failed to do this, I could reproduce your error.

..
---
Regards,
Norman



"smokiibear" wrote in message
ups.com...
When I apply your code below, I get the following error:

User-defined type not defined? How should this variable type be
defined?

Thanks.


Patrick Lee wrote:
One solution is to store your strings as keys for a
Collection or Dictionary (to use the latter, set a
reference in your VBA project to Microsoft Scripting
Runtime) object. Keys for both of these objects have to
be unique.
Personally, I would use a Dictionary object
dim dic1 as Dictionary
Set dic1 = New Dictionary

For iCounter = 1 to lYourNumberOfStrings
dim yourstring as string
' retrieve yourstring depending on iCounter
if not dic1.exists(yourstring) then
' we know that yourstring has not already been added
as a key to the dictionary
dic1.Add yourstring, 1 ' this adds yourstring as a
key and 1 as the value referenced by this key (the value
is not used here so anything will do)

end if
next iCounter

' after this loop, dic1.Keys() is an array going from 0
to dic1.Count -1 with the unique values of your strings

hth

Patrick