Question

I’m new to Regular Expressions and am having difficulty getting patterns that I find online to work in VBScript/VBA. This one is supposed to return a date found in a string but it fails to find any dates. What does VBScript/VBA do different than other RegEx engines that makes this fail to return a match?

Edit1
I removed the ^ and the $ from my pattern. The problem persists.

Private Sub TestDate()
    MsgBox RegExDate("cancel on 12/21/2010 ")
End Sub

Private Function RegExDate(s As String) As String
    Dim re, match
    Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    re.Pattern = "(((0[1-9]|[12]\d|3[01])\/(0[13578]|1[02])\/((19|[2-9]\d)\d{2}))|((0[1-9]|[12]\d|30)\/(0[13456789]|1[012])\/((19|[2-9]\d)\d{2}))|((0[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])\/02\/((19|[2-9]\d)\d{2}))|(29\/02\/((1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)(0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|((16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))"
    re.Global = True

    For Each match In re.Execute(s)
        MsgBox match.value
        RegExDate = match.value
        Exit For
    Next
    Set re = Nothing
End Function

Answer 1

It looks as if your RegEx will only find match if the whole string you pass to it is a date.

Try removing ^ and $

Here’s your example reworked using a RegEx that will find dates in the mm/dd/yyyy and mm-dd-yyyy formats –

Private Sub TestDate()
    MsgBox RegExDate("cancel on 12/21/2010 ")
End Sub

Private Function RegExDate(s As String) As String
    Dim re, match
    Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    re.Pattern = "(0[1-9]|1[012])[- /.](0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])[- /.](19|20)[0-9]{2}"
    re.Global = True

    For Each match In re.Execute(s)
        MsgBox match.Value
        RegExDate = match.Value
        Exit For
    Next
    Set re = Nothing
End Function