Need to find character within apostrophe substring and replace it, any ideas?

Question

Ok, let me preface this question with the fact that I am extremely new to vb script, but I need to make an addition to a script that another developer created and he is away.

Problem. : I am getting data that is feed into a process. The script I already have handles some things that I won't go into. One thing I found out that it doesn't handle correctly is commas that occur in double quotes.

So I get some data like this. :

Joe, Bill, James, Alex, "Google, Inc", Rose, "Kickstarter, LLC"

What happens is that when this script kicks to the process application it blows up because of these commas in the double quotes. I need to be able to have this script go in and replace those commas in the Google and Kickstarter blocks with something a little more unique.

If you have the answer to this I would appreciate it, but I wouldn't mind some direction either of something that does something like this, etc.

Any answers are greatly appreciated. Again very new to vbascript just started reading syntax on it today.

This sounds like a regular old CSV (comma-separated values) file. There are [existing methods](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/213657/how-to-read-csv-files-line-by-line-in-vbscript) for parsing such a file so you don't have to worry about issues like this. — Cheran Shunmugavel, Jun 26 '12 at 02:38

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 25 '12 at 23:42

You left out a few details about the format of the input data and the replacement text. However, the approach you need to take is to use the regular expression capability of VBScript to identify patterns in your input data, then use the "Replace" method to replace them. Here's a short MS article about regular expressions in VBScript.

Here's an example of what it might look like. This example is definitely NOT bullet proof and it makes some assumptions, but I think it will get you started:

Dim re, strstr, newstrstr
Dim inputstrarray(7)
Set re = new regexp 

inputstrarray(0) = "Joe"
inputstrarray(1) = "Bill"
inputstrarray(2) = "James"
inputstrarray(3) = "Alex"
inputstrarray(4) = """" & "Google, Inc" & """"
inputstrarray(5) = "Rose"
inputstrarray(6) = """" & "Kickstarter, LLC" & """"

re.pattern = ",\s"  'pattern is a comma followed by a space
For Each strstr In inputstrarray 'loop through each string in the array
    newstrstr = re.Replace(strstr, "_")  'replace the pattern with an underscore
    If StrComp(strstr,newstrstr) Then 
        Wscript.Echo "Replace " & strstr & " with " & newstrstr
    Else
        Wscript.Echo "No Change"   
    End If
Next

Output looks like the following:

No Change
No Change
No Change
No Change
Replace "Google, Inc" with "Google_Inc"
No Change
Replace "Kickstarter, LLC" with "Kickstarter_LLC"
No Change

Need to find character within apostrophe substring and replace it, any ideas?

1 Answers1