>>>Hi everybody,
>>>
>>>I have a character string representing Style which consists of the following portions:
>>>
>>>Color (1 letter with - or without -) Type (one or 2 letters) Number portion (could be any number but usually no more than 5 digits and not less than 2) then Stone (1 letter) then quality (number) then color quality (1 letter), e.g. for example:
>>>W-4568S5B
>>>E460D4
>>>E94E
>>>
>>>Now, all these portions are optional except for number portion. My task is to get the number portion first, then try to search, if we have a file with the same number, same first portion, same stone (if it was present), different quality. Then if there are no files with the same stone, I need to do other string manipulations.
>>>
>>>Can you help me to get Number portion first?
>>
>>Why not the usual trick with getting the digits only?
>>
>>lcJustDigits=chrtran(chrtran(lcAll, "0123456789",""),"")
>
>It's not going to work becase there could be two numeric parts, e.g. W-4568S5B

OK (I was distracted by the phone - didn't really notice), so we'd need a correction:

lcJustDigits=chrtran(chrtran(lcAll, "0123456789",""),space(len(lcAll)))
lcNr1=getwordnum(lcJustDigits,1)
lcNr2=getwordnum(lcJustDigits,2)

Then just get the val() of these two.