I wrote a routine to do the following – and it works fine, but I was
trying to be a bit elegant with my code. Can anyone give me some
direction if the way I wanted to program the routine can be done.

Here’s the problem I was coding a solution for:

I have an array that contains a list of products. For each customer, a
variable number of unique products are pulled and the pull order has
to be maintained. Additionally, the products are grouped for each
customer. So, a code in the form of “X.YY” is created for each
customer, where X is the group 1, 2, 3 … alpha, beta, etc… (alphas
have to follow numerics) . YY is the sequential order of the products
for each individual customer.

So, the data array has the product list going down the rows, while
each column is the specific customer with the X.YY code against those
products that comprise that order.

When I print out any customer’s order, the required format is a
heading for each group (starting with numerics, e.g. “Group 1, Group
2, etc”) and the product list in the sequential order. I accomplished
this by sorting the specific customer column in ascending order,
reading each product into a temporary array (along with the X.YY
code), then running each row of the temp array through a series of
'if' statements to print the product list. As each group is changed
(“X”), a new section header (“Group “ & X) would be printed, followed
by the product list. If the group was an alpha, it would just print
the alpha.

I got the code running with no problems using a number of if
statements (if X= number, if X= alpha, etc) and a lot of redundant
lines of code, but I was hoping to program something that would
recognize the change in group designation and make a few branch
changes, without a whole lot of software repeated.

Any suggestions?

Art