In Excel VB I'm trying to search a string for a 4 digit number denoting a year, ie. "The man was born in the year 1986, it was a sunny day", I am trying to extract the "1986" from this string. It seems like using regular expressions would be my best option however I'm unfamiliar with them, is the regular expression for a 4 digit number something like "\d{4}" ?,
if I find that my string contains such a number is there an efficient way for getting the start and end point of the string for extraction? I have ideas on how to do it but they seem very inefficient, is there a fast way to find and extract this data?
pseudocode:
dim bool As boolean
bool = cells(d, 1).Value.contains(\d{4})
if bool then
'extract string
end if
