Microsoft KB Archive/154600

= ACC: Parsing Titles Beginning with "A," "An," or "The" (95/97) =

Article ID: 154600

Article Last Modified on 1/19/2007

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Access 95 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Access 97 Standard Edition

-



This article was previously published under Q154600



Moderate: Requires basic macro, coding, and interoperability skills.



SUMMARY
Titles often begin with the article "A," "An," or "The." When you sort such title fields, you may not get the desired result of having the titles sorted in alphabetical order by their most meaningful words. For example, movie titles, such as "The Bronx," appear in the t's rather than the b's. To sort titles by a word other than "A," "An," or "The," use the function provided in this article in a query to build a field that will either remove the article completely or move it to the end.



MORE INFORMATION
This article assumes that you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications and with creating Microsoft Access applications using the programming tools provided with Microsoft Access. For more information about Visual Basic for Applications, please refer to your version of the "Building Applications with Microsoft Access" manual.

The function's syntax is as follows:

Function ParseArticle(strOldTitle As String, Optional varKeepArticle _     As Variant) As String ' strOldTitle is the field or value you want to parse. ' varKeepArticle is an optional variant value that, when left blank, ' will completely remove the article (for example, "The Beatles" becomes  ' "Beatles.")

On Error GoTo Err_Result Dim intLength As Integer, strArticle As String If IsMissing(varKeepArticle) Then varKeepArticle = False End If  intLength = Len(strOldTitle) strArticle = ""

' Check Value for preceding article (a, an, or the). If Left(strOldTitle, 2) = "a " Then strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 1) strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 2)

ElseIf Left(strOldTitle, 3) = "an " Then strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 2) strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 3)

ElseIf Left(strOldTitle, 4) = "the " Then strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 3) strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 4)

End If

' If varKeepArticle is TRUE, then add the article string to the end. If varKeepArticle Then ParseArticle = strOldTitle & strArticle Else ParseArticle = strOldTitle End If

Exit Function

Err_Result: ParseArticle = "#Error"

End Function

This function will check for article words at the beginning of a title and will make the desired changes to the title.

