RegEX question - Alpha only upper case only.

[Shortmeister1]

Hi

<code style="margin: 0px; padding: 1px 5px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, "Lucida Console", "Liberation Mono", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", monospace, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(239, 240, 241); white-space: pre-wrap; color: rgb(36, 39, 41);">"[A-Z]*"</code>

To my understanding, this should mean alpha only so that "BOB" would be True and "Bob" would be False.

It's not working of course! Am I missing something important?

Sub test1()Dim str As String
Dim regEx As New RegExp
Dim blnTest As Boolean


With regEx
    .IgnoreCase = False
    .Pattern = "[A-Z]*"
End With


str = "Bob"
blnTest = regEx.test(str)
Debug.Print str & vbTab & blnTest


Set regEx = Nothing

End Sub

 

[Scott Huish]

Try this as your pattern, because you need to match the whole string:

.Pattern = "^[A-Z]+$"

 

[Scott Huish]

Although another way to do this is to compare to the Ucase version of the string:

Sub test2()
Dim str As String
str = "Bob"
Debug.Print str = UCase(str)
End Sub

 

[Shortmeister1]

Thanks Scott

UCase is "money for old rope" really. Appreciated though.

I think what I'm trying to do is to improve my knowledge of REGEX which for something so simple is quite complicated!

So "^[A-Z]+$"

Could you unpack this for me. what does "^", "+" and "$" stand for?

Thanks for your help
Martin

 

[Rick Rothstein]

So "^[A-Z]+$"

Could you unpack this for me. what does "^", "+" and "$" stand for?

You might find one of these helpful in your attempts to learn RegEx...

Regex Tutorial—From Regex 101 to Advanced Regex

Regular Expression Tutorial - Learn How to Use Regular Expressions

https://www.princeton.edu/~mlovett/reference/Regular-Expressions.pdf

 

[Scott Huish]

As I have used it here. ^ means start of string. $ means end of string. + means 1 or more characters, it differs from * because that means 0 or more characters.

 

[Shortmeister1]

Thanks Scott.