Finding string patterns within a text, or Regular Expressions as the are called, can be easily accomplished in VBScript. Below is a sample code that illustrates how to find the pattern “-L” from a search string.

First we must declare our search string and create our Regular Expression Object.

strSearchString = “TPA-FWR-L001″
Set objRegExp = New RegExp

We then need to tell the object how to behave and what to look for. For example in our case we want to search for the pattern “-L” from within our search string. We have chosen to ignore case, so it will return a positive result for both upper and lower case. Lastly, we only want to return a positive result at the first occurance. By changing the global property to True it will return all instances.

With objRegExp
.Pattern = “-L”
.IgnoreCase = True
.Global = False
End With

We then want to execute our search and return the result into ExpMatch

Set ExpMatch = objRegExp.Execute(strSearchString)

And lastly, we verify if a match is found and return the result for each match. 

If ExpMatch.Count > 0 Then
For Each Matched in ExpMatch
‘Code to execute for each match goes here
MsgBox “Expression ” & objRegExp.Pattern & ” was found”
Next
End If

Filed under: Scripts