trouble with wildcards

[Luis939]

i'm having a little trouble with defining what my wildcards should be for my conditional statements, i need to ensure that all cells are not "" (null/blank) or MUST be in the form city, state intials (ID) or city, state - street (id)
for example valid strings are newark, nj (1234) or newark, nj - market st. (1234), there might be some text after the ID also

i tried
If activecell.value = "" Or Not (activecell.value Like "*, ?? (*)*&quot And Not (activecell.value Like "*, ?? - * (*)*&quot Then Exit Do

would this be correct, should that "And" be an "Or",
and should it be "*, ?? (*)*" or "*, ?? (*) *" because im not sure where that last * should be, i keep gettin conflicting results
Also it would help if there is a way of eliminiating extra blanks within my text, i want every word to be seperating by just one blank, i'm trying to match strings so i dotn want to get an error whenever i try to find whether "My String" is equal to "My String" becuase ill get an error, thanks!!!

 

[TonyJollans]

Hi 4335,

Assuming that all cells are not "" (null/blank) or MUST be in the form etc. means that empty cells are OK but that all non-empty cells must be in one of the formats you mention ...

There are three conditions. At most one of them can be true. If one of them is true you want to Exit Do (or whatever). If none of them are true you want to do something else. The "Not"s just confuse; more simply, try:

If activecell.value = "" Or activecell.value Like "*, ?? (*)*" Or activecell.value Like "*, ?? - * (*)*" Then Exit Do

Your wildcard strings look OK. If you want to lose multiple spaces then replace activecell.value with WorksheetFunction.Trim(activecell.value)

Enjoy,
Tony

 

[Luis939]

True, thanks!