Re: A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)

If there's an F-corr or A-corr for LEN() (length of string)
you can take the length, subtract one, substring the value
with [1,len()-1] then apply MCA, without writing a subroutine.

If you do write a subroutine, Mark's solution is elegant,
although I'd name it 'extract.leading.alpha'.

--
frosty

johnmarshall@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Folks
my posting a few weeks back revolved around getting the front numeric
characters of a stream of record IDs like the following:

R123
R12345
RC12
RC123
RC12345
S12
SV123456
SVX679101
SVX123

and the solution kindly proposed by a helpful poster was a synonym
like the one below called TYPE

001 S
002 0
003 TYPE
004
005
006
007
008 MCA
009 L
010 6

This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above
data I got 1 to 3 alpha characters, which was great as it allowed me
to seperate the data for reporting purposes, as the leading alphas
indicated the type of job (Production, repair, R&D, marketing etc etc)

All was going well until today, when horrors, I noticed that some
users had also been raising job numbers in the form R123A RC1234C
SZY45T etc, so that my TYPE synonym stopped working the way I wanted
as it now returned results like RA, RCC, SZYT for the data whereas I
just wanted just the first alpha part before the numeric, ie R, RC,
SZY.

Is their any simple tweak that I can do to my synonym to get just
those pesky leading alpha characters? Note that the number of
leading alphas and the following numerics can vary, but the end alpha
(after the numeric) if present at all, is only ever 1 character.

As usual, any suggestions appreciated.

John Marshall
Christchurch NZ


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)
    ... This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above ... data I got 1 to 3 alpha characters, which was great as it allowed me to ... wanted just the first alpha part before the numeric, ie R, RC, SZY. ... and the following numerics can vary, but the end alpha (after the ...
    (comp.databases.pick)
  • Re: A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)
    ... This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above ... data I got 1 to 3 alpha characters, which was great as it allowed me to ... and the following numerics can vary, but the end alpha (after the ...
    (comp.databases.pick)
  • A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)
    ... This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above ... data I got 1 to 3 alpha characters, which was great as it allowed me to ... wanted just the first alpha part before the numeric, ie R, RC, SZY. ... and the following numerics can vary, but the end alpha (after the ...
    (comp.databases.pick)
  • Re: A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)
    ... This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above ... data I got 1 to 3 alpha characters, which was great as it allowed me ... leading alphas and the following numerics can vary, ...
    (comp.databases.pick)
  • Re: A new twist on the last problem (D3/NT)
    ... The practical way seeing these items already exist - write a basic subroutine to parse the ID and return only the leading alpha characters. ... This synonym gave me all the alphas in the record ID so for the above ... and the following numerics can vary, but the end alpha (after the ...
    (comp.databases.pick)