Microsoft KB Archive/175390

= ACC2: How to Parse Titles Beginning with "A," "An," or "The" =

Article ID: 175390

Article Last Modified on 11/6/2000

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Access 2.0 Standard Edition

-



This article was previously published under Q175390



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.

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



MORE INFORMATION
NOTE: In the following sample code, an underscore (_) at the end of a line is used as a line-continuation character. Remove the underscore from the end of the line when re-creating this code in Access Basic.

Function ParseArticle(strOldTitle As String, varKeepArticle _     As Variant) As String

' strOldTitle is the field or value you want to parse. ' varKeepArticle is a variant value that, when False, completely ' removes the article (for example, "The Beatles" becomes "Beatles"). ' If varKeepArticle is True, the function places the article at the ' end of the string returned by the function (for example,     ' "The Beatles" becomes "Beatles, The").

On Error GoTo Err_Result Dim intLength As Integer, strArticle As String 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 Then ParseArticle = strOldTitle & strArticle Else ParseArticle = strOldTitle End If

Exit Function

Err_Result: ParseArticle = "#Error" End Function

