ACC: Parsing Titles Beginning with "A," "An," or "The" (95/97)

MORE INFORMATION

This article assumes that you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications and with creating Microsoft Access applications using the programming tools provided with Microsoft Access. For more information about Visual Basic for Applications, please refer to your version of the "Building Applications with Microsoft Access" manual.

The function's syntax is as follows:

   Function ParseArticle(strOldTitle As String, Optional varKeepArticle _
      As Variant) As String
   ' strOldTitle is the field or value you want to parse.
   ' varKeepArticle is an optional variant value that, when left blank,
   ' will completely remove the article (for example, "The Beatles" becomes
   ' "Beatles.")

   On Error GoTo Err_Result
   Dim intLength As Integer, strArticle As String
   If IsMissing(varKeepArticle) Then
      varKeepArticle = False
   End If
   intLength = Len(strOldTitle)
   strArticle = ""

   ' Check Value for preceding article (a, an, or the).
   If Left(strOldTitle, 2) = "a " Then
      strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 1)
      strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 2)

   ElseIf Left(strOldTitle, 3) = "an " Then
      strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 2)
      strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 3)

   ElseIf Left(strOldTitle, 4) = "the " Then
      strArticle = ", " & Left(strOldTitle, 3)
      strOldTitle = Right(strOldTitle, intLength - 4)

   End If

   ' If varKeepArticle is TRUE, then add the article string to the end.
   If varKeepArticle Then
    ParseArticle = strOldTitle & strArticle
   Else
    ParseArticle = strOldTitle
   End If

   Exit Function

   Err_Result:
     ParseArticle = "#Error"

   End Function
				

This function will check for article words at the beginning of a title and will make the desired changes to the title.