Parse numeric substring, generate accounting key

[SomeLinuxGuy]

Hello,
I'm a full time software developer, helping out a charity with their Access (.accdb) database in my spare time. There I need to work with an existing database that connects basic entities from one table with actions to perform on them in another table; everything is properly linked (1 entity -> n actions) and works as expected.
Now I have to add a code following a specific structure extracted from existing columns to the actions to make bookkeeping happy, and I encountered some basically simple issues I have problems solving with Access. I do not own a copy of Access (or Windows, for that matter), so I can't play around too much exploring the Access "API". Any help is appreciated, especially if it uses as little VBA as possible (where do I put that in the first place? in addition, commands are localised so VBA-solutions are of limited use on my regional system anyways); I'm fine with extensive SQL, though.

The rows used to calculate the key will contain, among others:

{
  internal_region_id: Integer,
  human_readable_entity_id: String.matching(/\w{2}\d+/),
  date: Date
}

The key will be a string value, constructed as follows: `<constant prefix><string from internal_region_id><calculated key string from human_readable_entity_id><last two digits of year from date>`.

1. Will simply using the concat symbol & be enough to concatenate a string with a numeric value or will I need to to string conversion first?
2. The calculated key value will be a starting number plus a number that must be parsed from the substring of another column's value. The column in question has a two-letter prefix followed by the numeric part without separators. Basically I need to calculate something like `100 + getTheNumericPartOf("ab123")` where the number of digits may vary. Reading through the documentation of string functions I could not find anything that would remove n chars from the beginning of a string or match a regex, so what would be the simplest way of getting that numeric part?
3. Getting the last two digits of the year (date value) should be easy by reading up a little on the string format functions, right?

 

[xenou]

Hi, in MSAccess the MID function would get the last digits of a string skipping the first two:

SELECT Mid(MyField,3) FROM MyTable

Last two digits of the year could in fact be the same (Right() would also work):

SELECT mid(year(Date()),3) FROM MyTable