I have been trying to figure this out for some time now and I'm getting frusturated, I'm hoping you vetrians can help me...I want to be able to extract addresses and names from a textfile. The catch is that the addressess and names change and I the only thing that doesn't change is the charitors before and after it. I was woundering if there is some way I can code it to say " copy all charitors when reaching 'a specified string' until 'second specified string'" For instance: <b><b xmlns=""> Name here </b>. How do I tell the code to search the text file and extract the 'name here' string?

Anything worth doing is worth doing good

Well, you can read the entire string and use a combination of the MID and REPLACE functions to get rid of characters such as < > " = but the problem is you also have <b> in there and the letter "b" is a valid character. Your addresses may have that letter in them as well. You'd also have to code to check for the combination strings "<b>" and "</b>".


Greg Serrano
Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division

If you can read the whole file into a string, you can use this method to look for all the strings included between two tokens. This method just prints them out, you have to decide what to do with them. This is a snippet of the code I use.
Marco

Private Sub FindTokens(s As String, sStart As String, sEnd As String)

    Dim k1 As Long
    Dim k2 As Long
    Dim kin As Long
    kin = 1

    Do
        k1 = InStr(kin, s, sStart, vbTextCompare)
        If k1 <= 0 Then Exit Sub
        k1 = k1 + Len(sStart)
        k2 = InStr(k1, s, sEnd, vbTextCompare)
        If k2 <= 0 Then Exit Sub

        Debug.Print Mid$(s, k1, k2 - k1) '' or put them in an array or something

        kin = k2 + Len(sStart)
    Loop

End Sub

I appreciate both of your help, I will try your suggestions and hopefully they work. Thank you

Anything worth doing is worth doing good