Working with Strings as Arrays

It might be hard to believe, but some of the most exciting features in Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) in Microsoft® Office XP are the functions for working with strings as arrays. These functions can turn once-lengthy string-manipulation procedures into just a few lines of code. And in many cases, they're faster than using loops and string-parsing techniques to work with the contents of a very large string.

In This Section

• The Split Function
  Use the Split function to take a string and convert it into an array of strings.
• The Join Function
  Use the Join function to concatenate the elements of the array together into a single string.
• The Filter Function
  Search a string array for all elements that match a given text string using one of three arguments — a string array, a string containing the text to find, or a constant specifying the string-comparison method

Related Sections

• Working with Strings
  Understand how to get information from strings.
• Comparing Strings
  Compare strings to determine whether they contain equivalent characters and how they differ if they do not match.
• Calculating String Length
  Determine the length of a string using the Len function to parse its contents.
• Searching a String
  Search strings to find out whether they contain a particular character or group of characters by using the InStr or InStrRev functions.
• Returning Portions of a String
  Learn how to parse the string to be able to work with part of a string's contents.
• Finding and Replacing Text Within a String
  Find and replace all occurrences of a substring within a string using the Replace function.
• Converting Text in a String from One Case to Another
  Use the Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) StrConv function to convert text in a string from one case to another.
• Working with String Variables
  Understand how to dimension a variable, assign a value to it, and output that variable as part of a string.