Illegal Assignment

Broodmdh · August 21st, 2008, 07:31 AM

I'm trying to concatenate a string in a for loop, which sounds quite simple in principle, but I'm getting the following error:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01f5'
Illegal assignment: 'I'

This is the code that I'm running:

tmpString = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW XYZ1234567890"
numSaltChars = 10
sSalt = ""
i = 0
for i = 1 to numSaltChars
    Randomize
    pos = Round(Rnd * Len(tmpString)) + 1
    sSalt = sSalt & tmpString.substring(pos,1)
next

I can't see what's wrong with the code. Any help would be appreciated.

Old Pedant · August 21st, 2008, 01:18 PM

VBScript does *NOT* support METHODS on strings.

tmpString.substring(pos,1)

You are trying to use a substring method, but that's only available in JavaScript and in the .NET languages (and Java, I guess).

Strings are *NOT* objects in VBScript. They are primitive types. So you have to use built in functions.

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Various other goofs in your code:

You call RANDOMIZE each time through the loop. That will actually *DESTROY* any attempts to get good random numbers. RANDOMIZE should be called once *PER PAGE* only.

You are using ROUND where you should use INT. ROUND *could* give you a number that is one greater than the length of your string, so you would get an "out of bounds" error!

Finally, you set i=0 for no reason at all, since the very next line will throw away that value.

********************

SO:

Code:

CONST numSaltChars = 10
Randomize ' remember, once PER PAGE!

tmpString = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890"
sLen = Len(tmpString)
sSalt = ""

for i = 1 to numSaltChars
    sSalt = sSalt & Mid( tmpString, 1 + INT(sLen * RND()), 1 )
next

Broodmdh · August 22nd, 2008, 06:21 AM

Great, thanks for the help.