I needed to determine the number of times one particular string occurred as part of a larger string. Specifically, I needed to determine how many tabs were at the start of a line of text in order to convert to a properly nested indent (i.e., for each tab, I needed to indent .5").
Poking around, I knew I could parse out the string and iterate through a counter for each time I found the string. Cumbersome, but doable. I'm lazy, and didn't want to type that many lines of code, so I thought about it a little more and thought the built in Split() function could be leveraged to do what I need.
Indeed, that was the case and the resulting code is shown below:
Poking around, I knew I could parse out the string and iterate through a counter for each time I found the string. Cumbersome, but doable. I'm lazy, and didn't want to type that many lines of code, so I thought about it a little more and thought the built in Split() function could be leveraged to do what I need.
Indeed, that was the case and the resulting code is shown below:
Public Function CountCharacter(ByVal theString As String, ByVal strSearchChar As String) As Integer
Dim iCount As Integer
Dim myarray() As String
myarray = Split(theString, strSearchChar)
iCount = UBound(myarray)
CountCharacter = iCount
End Function
Dim iCount As Integer
Dim myarray() As String
myarray = Split(theString, strSearchChar)
iCount = UBound(myarray)
CountCharacter = iCount
End Function
The code does exactly what I hoped, is case-sensitive, and can be used to count the number of occurrences of any text element in any other text element. In my specific case, to search for the number of tabs at the start of a line, I used a range object to identify the text and passed the vbTab constant as the search character:
MsgBox "The number of tabs in the line is " & CountCharacters(myRange.Text, vbTab)
Of course, a selection object's text attribute can be passed as well, or any string variables if you've already done some processing on a piece of text from a document.
The end result is a fast, clean and small amount of code. That, I liked. If you are interested, the code that converted the tabs to indents was equally small (altRange is the string from the start of the line to the first non-tab character, and wholeRange is the paragraph where altRange is found):
The end result is a fast, clean and small amount of code. That, I liked. If you are interested, the code that converted the tabs to indents was equally small (altRange is the string from the start of the line to the first non-tab character, and wholeRange is the paragraph where altRange is found):
i = CountCharacter(altRange.Text, vbTab)
altRange.Delete
wholeRange.ParagraphFormat.LeftIndent = InchesToPoints(0.5 * i)
altRange.Delete
wholeRange.ParagraphFormat.LeftIndent = InchesToPoints(0.5 * i)
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