I had written my own but it had a bug. Then I found this code below on this site.
It gives credit to John Walkenbach who writes, bar none, the best books on Excel.
Public Function ExtractElement(Txt, n, Separator) As String ' Returns the nth element of a text string, where the ' elements are separated by a specified separator character Dim Txt1 As String, temperament As String Dim ElementCount As Integer, i As Integer Txt1 = Txt ' If space separator, remove excess spaces If Separator = Chr(32) Then Txt1 = Application.Trim(Txt1) ' Add a separator to the end of the string If Right(Txt1, Len(Txt1)) <> Separator Then _ Txt1 = Txt1 & Separator ' Initialize ElementCount = 0 TempElement = "" ' Extract each element For i = 1 To Len(Txt1) If Mid(Txt1, i, 1) = Separator Then ElementCount = ElementCount + 1 If ElementCount = n Then ' Found it, so exit ExtractElement = TempElement Exit Function Else TempElement = "" End If Else TempElement = TempElement & Mid(Txt1, i, 1) End If Next i ExtractElement = "" End Function
And the following function returns nothing more than the number of elements you get when you cut a string according to a particular delimiter.
Public Function ExtractElementCount(Txt, Separator) As String ' Returns the number of different elements in a string ' separated by a specified separator character ' This is useful if you are, for example trying to grab the last element or the second to last. Dim Txt1 As String, temperament As String Dim ElementCount As Integer, i As Integer Txt1 = Txt ' If space separator, remove excess spaces If Separator = Chr(32) Then Txt1 = Application.Trim(Txt1) ' Add a separator to the end of the string If Right(Txt1, Len(Txt1)) <> Separator Then _ Txt1 = Txt1 & Separator ' Initialize ElementCount = 0 TempElement = "" ' Extract each element For i = 1 To Len(Txt1) If Mid(Txt1, i, 1) = Separator Then ElementCount = ElementCount + 1 End If Next i ExtractElementCount = ElementCount End Function
Footnote
I see that John Walkenbach has a post about The Versatile Split Function
VBA’s Split function, introduced with Excel 2000, can simplify many programming tasks. This function accepts a text string, and returns a zero-based variant array that contains the elements of the string (you specify the character that delimits the elements).
And then you can replace the ExtractElement with just this! Wow!
Function ExtractElement(str As String, n As Integer, sepChar As String) As Variant ' Returns the nth element from a string, ' using a specified separator character Dim x As Variant x = Split(str, sepChar) If n > 0 And n - 1 < = UBound(x) Then ExtractElement = x(n - 1) Else ExtractElement = "" End If End Function
And in case you haven’t had enough you can just do a word count with this.
Function WordCount(txt as String) As Long ' Returns the number of words in a string Dim x As Variant txt = Application.Trim(txt) x = Split(txt, " ") WordCount = UBound(x) + 1 End Function
There are some more examples on the j-walk site.
- extract a path or a filename from a full filespec
- Counting specific characters in a string
- Finding the longest word
