Need a true-false expression that will identify if a string contains a date

[TheresAlwaysAWay]

There's probably a very simple answer to this but I haven't found it yet.

I'm hoping someone can help me write an expression that will evaluate to true when looking at a string that contains any date value. If there is no date value in the string it would evaluate to false.

As always, thanks in advance for your assistance.

 

[TheresAlwaysAWay]

One clarification. The string would contain the date value along with other information. It would not be a string field composed exclusively of a date. I'm trying to return a true by evaluating a field like this one. "Tom Jones, 2/1/1980, London, England", but return a false if it's "Tom Jones, London, England".

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

So will there ALWAYS be a SPACE and/or COMMA delimiting the date?

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[TheresAlwaysAWay]

No, that was a poor example. It will be a name like Fred, then space/hyphen/space, then the date, then space/hyphen/space, like this: Fred - 2/19/2018 - Plus text to follow. The field will always begin with an name identifying who wrote a note, the date the note was inserted, and then the text of the note itself. Of course, the name and date will be different all the time. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear.

 

[MajP]

[b]Public Function HasDate(varText As Variant) As Boolean
  Dim aText() As String
  Dim I As Integer
  If Not IsNull(varText) Then
    aText = Split(varText, "-")
    For I = 0 To UBound(aText)
      If IsDate(Trim(aText(I))) Then
        'Debug.Print aText(I)
        HasDate = True
        Exit Function
      End If
    Next I
  End If
End Function[/b]

Selec field1, field2... HasDate([YourTextField]) as HasDate from sometable

 

[MajP]

This may be more robust.

Public Function HasDate2(strWord As Variant) As Boolean
  
  'Need Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions
   Dim objRegExp As VBScript_RegExp_55.RegExp
   Dim objMatch As VBScript_RegExp_55.match
   Dim myPattern As String
   'Match for all emails
   If Not IsNull(strWord) Then
   myPattern = "\d{1,2}/\d{1,2}/\d{4}"
  'Create a regular expression object.
   Set objRegExp = New RegExp
  'Set the pattern by using the Pattern property.
   objRegExp.Pattern = myPattern
  'Set Case Insensitivity.
   objRegExp.ignorecase = False
  'Set global applicability. Not sure what that does
   objRegExp.Global = True
  'Test whether the String can be compared. Not sure what that does
    If (objRegExp.test(strWord) = True) Then
       Set ReturnMatches = objRegExp.Execute(strWord)   ' Execute search.
       If ReturnMatches.Count > 0 Then
         Debug.Print "has date"
         HasDate2 = True
       End If
     End If
  End If
 '
End Function

 

[TheresAlwaysAWay]

Thanks, MajP. I won't be able to check it till tomorrow. I'll let you know.