Comments on: Pattern Matching

By: Rob van Gelder

Rob van Gelder — Mon, 09 May 2011 01:12:00 +0000

The documentation link in the article no longer works.
I found it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6wzad2b2(VS.85).aspx

By: Danio

Danio — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:12:00 +0000

OY!!

I'm having a really hard time doing a simple thing.... I just need to check whether the length of a number in Cell A is less or equal to 13 digits and then have Cell B's value be one of 2 things ...
PS. I haven't used any excel since school

By: Help getting broken out of field (excel)

Help getting broken out of field (excel) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:08:00 +0000

[...] can get it to work in 2003 (We’ve got 2000, really keeping up on the features here). Take a look at Daily Dose of Excel ª Blog Archive ª Pattern Matching which seems to have a pretty easy user defined function for pattern matching. Wolffy, [...]

By: Eivind

Eivind — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 20:47:00 +0000

Thank you very much, this was really helpful.

The code is looping through a list of URLs that are generated from Google Analytics using arrays.
The list is ordered from highest to lowest pageview number. Since I don't know how many URLs the list will contain, some of the cells will show #N/A instead of he URL and pageview number.

Example:
URL Pageview
/url-1 10
/url-2 7
#N/A #N/A

This made the code not working, so I added some On Error Resume Next to fix the problem. The code is below, and it is working, but if you see anything that should be different, please let me know.

Dim reg As New RegExp

Public Function RegSum(Source As Range, Pattern As String, SumRange As Range, Optional IgnoreCase As Boolean = True, Optional MultiLine As Boolean = True) As Double
Dim rng As Range, i As Long, j As Long, dbl As Double

With reg
.IgnoreCase = IgnoreCase
.MultiLine = MultiLine
.Pattern = Pattern
End With

On Error Resume Next

dbl = 0

For i = 1 To Source.Rows.Count
If Err.Number = 0 Then

For j = 1 To Source.Columns.Count

If reg.Test(Source(i, j).Value) Then dbl = dbl + SumRange(i, j).Value
Next
End If
Next
RegSum = dbl
End Function

Again, thank you very much for your help.

By: Rob van Gelder

Rob van Gelder — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:20:00 +0000

A quick helper function. You can adjust to fit:

Public Function RegSum(Source As Range, Pattern As String, SumRange As Range, Optional IgnoreCase As Boolean = True, Optional MultiLine As Boolean = True) As Double
Dim rng As Range, i As Long, j As Long, dbl As Double

reg.IgnoreCase = IgnoreCase
reg.MultiLine = MultiLine
reg.Pattern = Pattern

dbl = 0
For i = 1 To Source.Rows.Count
For j = 1 To Source.Columns.Count
If reg.test(Source(i, j).Value) Then dbl = dbl + SumRange(i, j).Value
Next
Next
RegSum = dbl
End Function

A3 = ^New York$
A6:A8 = New York, New Year, New York
B6:B8 = 5, 6, 10

Function call
=RegSum(A6:A8, A3, B6:B8)

By: Eivind

Eivind — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:53:00 +0000

Thank you for a very useful example. Although I see it was written in 2005, I still hope somebody can answer my question.

If I understand this code correctly, as soon as it find a match it will exit the loop. But what if there were several matches, and I want them all summed up. How should the loop be written then?

Example, I want all instances of New York and the number to be summed up:

Value
New York 5
New Year 6
New York 10

The result should be 15. The code example in this article will give me the number 5 and exit the loop. Correct?

Thanks in advance.

By: posfan12

posfan12 — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:21:00 +0000

Excel 2002, rather. Even less common…

By: posfan12

posfan12 — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:17:00 +0000

I’m running into problems where Excel complains about “RegExp” being an undefined user data type.

Not sure what is going wrong, but I’m running Excel 2003 on Windows 7 64-bit, which is probably not a common setup.

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:17:00 +0000

Also, someone recently posted that MOREFUNC can fail in Excel 2007. Haven’t tried it myself, have never used MOREFUNC, but if that is correct it validates my decision.

By: Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel)

Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:33:00 +0000

@fzz...

==> then better still to use MOREFUNC.XLL regular expressions.

I still like rolling my own code... and the function I came up with is relatively short... plus, in my opinion, will be easier to read next week than the regular expression pattern will be. [grin]

==> but why Ä¶ & Äú-Äù & Äú*Äù & Äú-Äù & Ä¶ rather than
==> Ä¶ & Äú-*-Äù & Ä¶ in the first Replace call?

I originally had Chr$(1) instead of the dashes; then I did a Replace on the Chr$(1) and replaced them with "-"; then I noticed I could replace the "-"&"*"&"-" with "-*-", which I did by hand... and, of course, I missed one of them.