Hi Ken,

You might find Laurent Longré's functions for Regular Expressions useful; they are well explained on his site

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/te...527321033.aspx

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

"Ken McLennan" wrote in message ...
| G'day there One and All,
|
| This latest query of mine will, I hope, find a more elegant method
| than the one I'm now using.
|
| My code processes a number of strings which relate to shift
| starting times. They're in varied formats and my code tries to reduce
| them to the same format for ease of processing. For instance, I might
| have a time entered by my users as "6:00", "6am", or just plain "6" (I
| need an appropriate shift end time to determine whether the latter is
| "am" or "pm").
|
| I have things working fairly well, and as part of the parsing of
| the string I remove extraneous characters. What I want to do is to
| remove every letter except an "a" or a "p" so that "6pm" becomes "6p",
| and "6:00am On Call" becomes "6a". (In case you're wondering, before I
| can do anything useful, the time string is attatched to a date and
| converted to a standard date/time format as data type "date", not data
| type "string").
|
| I currently process it by referring each character in the string,
| in turn, to this list:
|
| "bcdefghijklmnoqrstuvwxyz"
|
| with "instr(str_TESTSTR)" and removing anything that matches, but
| this seems quite cumbersome and time consuming.
|
| I have no clue when it comes to reg expressions, and don't even
| know whether any such thing would be a useful technique in this
| instance.
|
| Is there some other way to do it, that my pedestrian grey matter
| hasn't comprehended? Is there some way to stuff the above 24 char string
| into a "replace" function, maybe?
|
| My code will (eventually) be deployed across the state and there
| is no possibility of having anything installed on the target machines so
| extra functions via add-ins are out. I can only use what I manage to
| stuff into a module via the VBE.
|
| Surely there's a better way to do it than what I've come up with!
|
| Thanks for listening.
| --
| See ya,
| Ken McLennan
| Qld, Australia