Question

I am new at excel VB and seek assistant in the following problem below:

I have a column A with following values below:

column A
"VL50s"
"M50s"
"H50s"
"VL50s"
"H50s"

I would like to extract the numbers and run the following arithmetic function below into coloumn B.

key:
x is a number
VLx --> (x) + 1
Mx -->(x) + 2
Hx --> (x) + 3

the output should look like the following using the key above:

coloumn B
51
52
53
51
53

I would like to ask how would i go about doing this function in VBA. Thank you for your assistance.

Answer 1

Because you say the number of letter/number combos is much greater than in your example I think this is a problem for VBA and not a worksheet function. A WS function would become to hard to maintain and to beastly very quickly.

I made these 4 functions. The GetCharArray function parses the text of the string you pass it to return that text as an array of characters (even though BA doesn’t have a char type just a string type so I am returning a string. Same idea)

Then given that we can call GetNumberFromChars to get the 50 from VL50s and call GetLeftMostLetters to get the VL from VL50s.

Then is some worksheet I made a named range called keys where column 1 of the range is letters like “VL”, “H”, “M” … and the corresponding value associated with it is in column 2. It would look like

Col1    Col2
VL      1
M       2
H       3
...     ...

We can use the vlookup worksheet function with the Range("keys") and the result of GetLeftMostLetters to find the number that should be added to the result of GetNumberFromChars.

Function GetNewNumber(inString As String) As Double
    Dim searchString As String, numberToAddFromKeys As Double, numberToAddToFromCell As Long, cellChars() As String

    cellChars = GetCharArray(inString)
    searchString = GetLeftMostLetters(cellChars)
    numberToAddToFromCell = GetNumberFromChars(cellChars)

    'use the keys named range where column 1 is your letters ("VL","H"...)
    'and column 2 is the corresponding value for that letter set
    numberToAddFromKeys = WorksheetFunction.VLookup(searchString, Range("keys"), 2, 0)

    GetNewNumber = CDbl(numberToAddFromKeys) + CDbl(numberToAddToFromCell)
End Function


Function GetNumberFromChars(inChars() As String) As Long
    Dim returnNumber As String, i As Long, numberStarted As Boolean

    For i = 1 To UBound(inChars)
        If IsNumeric(inChars(i)) Then
            If Not numberStarted Then numberStarted = True
            returnNumber = returnNumber & inChars(i)
        Else
            If numberStarted Then
                'this will ignore that "s" on the end of your sample data
                'hopefully that's what you need
                GetNumberFromChars = returnNumber
                Exit Function
            End If
        End If
    Next
End Function

Function GetLeftMostLetters(inChars() As String) As String
    Dim returnString As String, i As Long

    For i = 1 To UBound(inChars)
        If Not IsNumeric(inChars(i)) Then
            returnString = returnString & inChars(i)
        Else
            GetLeftMostLetters = returnString
        End If
    Next
End Function


Function GetCharArray(inText As String) As String()
    Dim s() As String, i As Long
    ReDim s(1 To Len(inText))

    For i = 1 To UBound(s)
      s(i) = Mid$(inText, i, 1)
    Next
    GetCharArray = s
End Function

So it can be used as such…

Dim cell As Range, rng As Range
'set this range to your actual range. 

Set rng = Sheets("your sheet name").Range("A1:A5")       
For Each cell In rng
    'put this resulting value wherever you want.
    Debug.Print GetNewNumber(cell.Value)
Next cell