CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vb.netstring
Justin E
Justin E

Reputation: 1250

VB.net String Extraction

At the company I work at, I have a software that I am developing in vb.net. This software uses a web browser control to load an excel file that the employee can modify. If then saves a copy of the excel file as an excel file for future modification, it saves it as a pdf file, to send to the customer, then prints the first page twice. I am trying to create a quote list. Quote File names are structured as follows...

12345 My Company Name Here 10-25-2013.pdf

Is there any way to "extract" just the "My Company Name Here" in the above example. I tried removing all numbers, and then the - and .pdf from the string, but it actually makes it where fewer results appear in the list view control. Any Ideas? 

Dim di As New IO.DirectoryInfo("Z:\Quotes\" & Today.Year & "\" & Today.Month _
        & " " & MonthName(Today.Month))
    Dim diar1 As IO.FileInfo() = di.GetFiles("*.pdf")
    Dim dra As IO.FileInfo
    ListView1.View = View.Details
    ListView1.Columns.Clear()
    ListView1.Columns.Add("Quote Number")
    ListView1.Columns.Add("Customer Name")
    ListView1.Columns(0).Width = -2
    ListView1.Columns(1).Width = -2

    For Each dra In diar1
        If dra.ToString.Contains("Product") = False Or dra.ToString.Contains("Thumbs.db") Then
            Dim newIrm() = dra.ToString.Split(" ")
            Dim NumericCharacters As New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("\d")
            Dim nonNumericOnlyString As String = NumericCharacters.Replace(newIrm(2), String.Empty)
            ListView1.Items.Add(New ListViewItem({newIrm(0), newIrm(1) & newIrm(2)}))
        End If
    Next

Filename Format: 

 Z:\Quotes\2013\10 October\12345-RR My Company Name Here 10-25-2013.pdf

Upvotes: 0

Views: 584

Answers (2)

user2480047
user2480047

Reputation:

By assuming that the company name is always surrounded by blank spaces and that all the surrounding text does not contain any, you can use IndexOf and LastIndexOf. Sample code:

Dim input As String = "Z:\Quotes\2013\10 October\12345-RR My Company Name Here 10-25-2013.pdf"
Dim companyName As String = System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(input)

companyName = companyName.Substring(companyName.IndexOf(" "), companyName.LastIndexOf(" ") - companyName.IndexOf(" ")).Trim()

If these conditions do not fully apply, you would have to describe clearly the constraints in order to update this code. Without systematically-applied constraints, there wouldn't be any way to deliver an accurate solution for this problem.

Upvotes: 2

nhgrif
nhgrif

Reputation: 62072

The postfix (date.pdf) is a constant size assuming your date format uses leading zeros. The prefix is a variable size, however the first space of the complete file name always comes before the first character of the company name.

Using these two facts, you can easily find the index of the first and last character of the company "extract" the company name using this information.

Alternatively, you can split the file name into an array using space as your delimiter. You can then grab every index of the array, excluding the first and last index, and combine these elements seperated by a space.

Upvotes: 1

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