Excel VBA: How to remove substrings from a cell?

Question

I have a cell value like this:

This is a <\"string\">string, It should be <\"changed\">changed to <\"a\"> a number.

There

Answer 1

Following up on the suggestion to use regular expressions, here's an example:

Option Explicit

Sub RemoveByRegexWithLateBinding()

    Dim strIn As String
    Dim strOut As String
    Dim objRegex As Object

    'input
    strIn = "This is a <""string"">string, It should be <""changed"">changed to <""a""> a number."
    Debug.Print "Input:" & vbCr & strIn

    'create and apply regex
    Set objRegex = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
    objRegex.Pattern = "<""[^<>""]*"">"
    objRegex.Global = True
    strOut = objRegex.Replace(strIn, "")

    'test output
    Debug.Print "Output:" & vbCr & strOut

End Sub

Produces this output:

Input:
This is a <"string">string, It should be <"changed">changed to <"a"> a number.
Output:
This is a string, It should be changed to  a number.

Diagram of regular expression:

Which can be explained as finding a string that:

• begins with <"
• contains anything apart from the characters <, > and "
• ends with ">