>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>For APN I have this format:
>>999999X-X999999X-X999999XX-XX999999X-XXXXXX,
>>
>> where 9 is a digit,
>> X as upper case alpha,
>> and - is hyphen.
>>
>>I have an UDF, which determines, is APN valid by inspecting each character. I'm just curious, is there more elegant and simple solution (and should be faster, of course)?
>>
>>Thanks in advance.
>

---

>Hi Nadya,
>
>I think the code below does what you want in the generic way.
>It certainly can be improved but i'll live it to you :)
>

>lcMask = "999999X-X999999X-X999999XX-XX999999X-XXXXXX"
>lcAPN  = "123456A-B789012C-D345678EF-GH901234I-KLMNOP"
>
>lcDigits = "0123456789"
>lcLetters = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
>
>
>lcMaskUniform = CHRTRAN( lcMask, lcDigits, REPLICATE("0", 10))
>lcMaskUniform = CHRTRAN( lcMaskUniform, lcLetters, REPLICATE("A", 26))
>
>
>lcAPNUniform = CHRTRAN( lcAPN, lcDigits, REPLICATE("0", 10))
>lcAPNUniform = CHRTRAN( lcAPNUniform, lcLetters, REPLICATE("A", 26))
>
>
>RETURN lcAPNUniform = lcMaskUniform
>

An even better solution is available in the WSH's VBScript.RegExp object, which can construct complex regular expressions and evaluate them on demand, using standard regular expression matching masks. It requires installation of WSH v 2.0; the RegExp object is documented in the WSH docs pertaining to VBScript, and is covered in detail in Wrox Press' "VBScript Programmer's Reference Manual". The masking requirement outlined above is well within the capability of the VBScript.RegExp object's pattern definition capability. I'm not going to write the code to do it, though.