Question

This is my first question here, so I hope everything is correct. I’ve hacked a bit of code to read from excel and output a CSV with speech marks for every cell, blank or not. The problem is with the dates where excel converts a YYYY-MM-DD date to MM-DD-YYYY when it writes it to the CSV. To get around this I’ve written the following if statement:

If IsDate(Cells(r, c)) Then

Unfortunately the program now interprets a cell with “2A” in it as a date as well (even though I’ve checked the format in excel is text), exporting this as “1899-12-30”. I’ve put in a very quick and dirty clause to filter this

If Selection.Cells(r, c) = "2A" Then

But I was wondering if there was a more elegant way, to convert date formats that are only in the YYYY-MM-DD or similar format. And why it thinks A2 is a date!? Full code is below:

For r = 1 To Selection.Rows.Count
    s = """"
    c = 1
    For c = 1 To Selection.Columns.Count
            If IsDate(Selection.Cells(r, c)) Then
                'ridiculous clause to get rid of A2 being treated as a date
                If Selection.Cells(r, c) = "2A" Then
                    s = s & Selection.Cells(r, c)
                Else
                    s = s & Format(Selection.Cells(r, c), "YYYY-MM-DD")
                End If
            Else
                s = s & Selection.Cells(r, c)
            End If
            If c = Selection.Columns.Count Then
                s = s & """" 'end of row
            Else
                s = s & """,""" 'mid row
            End If
    Next c
    a.writeline s
Next r

Answer 1

The problem arises because 2A is interpreted as 2 AM:

?isdate("2A")
True

?cdate("2A")
02:00:00 

Dealing with this depends on what types of values are in the column alongside the dates, you could check their length or check for the default date that’s used when a DateTime contains no date part;

if format$(cdate("2A"), "YYYY-MM-DD") = "1899-12-30" then ..dodgy..

or look at its pattern; if isdate(x) and x like "####-##-##"
or you could convert the value to a date and check that it falls within an appropriate range.

You could also reformat the column itself Selection.NumberFormat = "yyyy-mm-dd".