Finding Acronyms in Strings

Question

I need to determine if an attribute name contains an approved Acronym. The only way to determine this, that I can think of is to find 2 side by side Capital Letters in a string. Can this be done using a SQL query?

Answer 1

I don't think a simple Query will work here. You'll almost surely need some VBA, and I'm not awake enough yet to come up with a sample.

Answer 2

I am looking for any string containing 2 or more capital letters next to each other, and not separated by white space. Examples:

Record LTSC Indicator = LTSC

John Q Account Number = NULL

Loan UPB Amount = UPB

Security REMIC UPB Amount = REMIC, UPB

Market US Libor 1 Month Rate = US

If I can determine acronyms it would be easy to compare to a list of valid Acronyms. Using Excel is an option as well!

Answer 3

Hrm. Access searches are not case sensitive; a search for LIKE "*AB*" would find records containing "Cabinet", "CDABC" or "Abrupt". I think you'll need some VBA code to parse the string, using the ASCII value of the string.

What's the context here? Are you looking for any string containing two or more capital letters anywhere in the string ("cdABc"), delimited by whitespace ("AB xyz" or "wxy AB c"), or what? Could you post a few examples of realistic search strings and the desired results?

Answer 4

Your suggestion would only find Acronyms that exist. I need to find the Terms/Attributes that contain an acronym that is not an approved Acronym. The only way to do that, in this case, is to determine Attributes that have more than one contiguous Upper case character.

Answer 5

You can use the LIKE function.

WHERE [YourText] Like "*" & [Enter Acronym] & "*"

Of course instead of entering each one manually you can have a table of 'approved acronym.'