I’ve spent some time lately exploring searching and replacing techniques in a variety of scripting languages. I hope to share some of these experiences later. Right now I wanted to briefly share a tip when searching for text using VBScript. This is a common task and one that causes many novice scripters more than a little grief.<\/p>\n
A typical VBScript expression is to use InStr() to determine whether a given substring exists within a larger string. In a related vein, you might use the Replace function to replace all instances of a given string with another. The problem is how you accomplish that comparison. By default both functions perform a binary comparison. This means that “APPLE” and “APPLE” will match, but “APPLE” and “Apple” won’t. What you need to do is perform a text comparison which ignores case. <\/p>\n
Both InStr and Replace have an optional parameter to specify the comparison method. You can use the VBScript constants of vbTextCompare <\/span>or vbBinaryCompare<\/span>. If you use the former, I strongly recommend you use the complete syntax for each function. In fact, you’ll likely get an error if you don’t.<\/p>\n I’ve put together a sample script that demonstrates how the different techniques work.<\/p>\n s=”The quick brown fox used Primalscript. The fox was smart!”<\/span> Save this code to your computer. Run it with Cscript at a command prompt. Play around with different variations for strFind and you’ll quickly appreciate the differences. I’m not advocating you never use vbBinaryCompare <\/span>or the default settings for InStr and Replace. I merely want you to understand the differences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve spent some time lately exploring searching and replacing techniques in a variety of scripting languages. I hope to share some of these experiences later. Right now I wanted to briefly share a tip when searching for text using VBScript. This is a common task and one that causes many novice scripters more than a little grief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-vbscript"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
‘FOX (or any other case formatting such as fOX) only works with vbTextCompare<\/span>
‘fox works in all cases since it is an exact match<\/span>
strFind=”FOX”<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Using simple defaults”<\/span>
If InStr(s,strFind) Then <\/span>
WScript.Echo “Found with using defaults”<\/span>
s2=Replace(s,strFind,”dog”)<\/span>
WScript.Echo s2<\/span>
Else<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Not found with defaults”<\/span>
End If<\/span>
WScript.Echo String(20,”*”)<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Using vbBinaryCompare”<\/span>
If InStr(1,s,strFind,vbBinarycompare) Then <\/span>
WScript.Echo “Found with vbBinaryCompare”<\/span>
s2=Replace(s,strFind,”dog”,1,-1,vbBinaryCompare)<\/span>
WScript.Echo s2<\/span>
Else<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Not found with vbBinaryCompare”<\/span>
End If<\/span>
WScript.Echo String(20,”*”)<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Using vbTextCompare”<\/span>
If InStr(1,s,strFind,vbTextcompare) Then <\/span>
WScript.Echo “Found with vbTextCompare”<\/span>
s2=Replace(s,strFind,”dog”,1,-1,vbTextCompare)<\/span>
WScript.Echo s2<\/span>
Else<\/span>
WScript.Echo “Not found with vbTextCompare”<\/span>
End If<\/span><\/p>\n