replacing special characters in recordset access vba - ms-access

I'm using input tables with special chars, but my output tables need to be without them.
So i need function that would replace special chars in query or table
for example
Š=S Č=C Ć=C Ž=Z
Any sugestions?


You could pop them into a string, and then use Replace, e.g. strYourString = Replace(strYourString, "Š","S").
Downside of this approach is you'd need to specify all the special characters you want to replace, and run the code several times, perhaps as a loop.


Replace function does that but (as far as I know) for single character:
Expr1: Replace([Employees].[Prezime];"č";"c")
For a fast but not efficiant solution you can create several fileds named Expr1, Expr2 Expr3, and in each remove one special character.
But I am searching for more "decent" solution.

Related

MySQL only replace a single character if a pattern of characters is not there

I need to be able to replace a single character as long as it's not a specific combination of other characters. For example, if I find a single ' in my TEXT value, I need to escape it; but if it's already escaped (\') I need to ignore it.
There could also be more complex variations such as \"\ that I simply want to replace with -.
I also need to see if there are \" entries, but make sure they aren't already \\" (double escaped).
I'm guessing the solution is REGEXP_REPLACE, but I don't know how to properly tell it to NOT replace a matching pattern if another pattern exists...
Thanks!

easy way to query without putting everything in quotation marks

How do I query in MySql without putting all inserts in quotations? (I have a big list and it would take to much time to quote and unquote every word)
Example:
SELECT *
FROM names
WHERE names.first IN ("joe", "tom", "vincent")

Since you said the list is comma separated, simply use the 'find and replace' feature to find all commas and replace them with ","
The result should be joe","tom","vincent"," which you can simply copy into mysql.
All you then have to do is edit the start and end of the string

how to find a comma with mysql find_in_set

is it possible to find a commma with find_in_set?
I tried:
select find_in_set('\,', '\,');
my use case is:
where find_in_set(r.tag, vfilterList)
here, vfilterList is a comma separated list provided as input to a stored procedure - and r.tag is the tag string in the table. (So I want to filter to only rows that have a tag that's in the vfilterList). However some tag strings have commas in them. (in vfilterList the commas in tags would be escaped?).
Something tells me i'm doing it wrong?

No, it isn't possible.
The documentation specifically points out that this doesn't work.
This function does not work properly if the first argument contains a comma (“,”) character.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/string-functions.html#function_find-in-set
The function is designed to return the ordinal position of a substring, delimited by commas. By definition, essentially, it would never find anything with a comma in it, since it's only considering the values between them.
Depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish, INSTR() or SUBSTRING_INDEX() might be useful.

Ended up just replacing commas with pipes. (and doing the same for each tag within the filter list). It's reasonably accurate with false positives very unlikely for our use case.
where find_in_set(replace(r.tag,",","|"), vfilterList)

Ideas for Find and Replace character

I need to search address fields and change one character to upper case if there is an apartment number. So '521 Main St. #3b' would change to '521 Main St. #3B'.
The way I know to do this would be to write a program that loops through the recordset, looks at the address field for the last character to see if it's an alpha, then if the character before it is a numeric, change the case of the last char and update the record.
Is this something that would be quicker/simpler with regular expressions (haven't ever used)?
If so, is this best done from within a programming environmnet or using a text editor such as Textmate or vi ? The data is in MySQL and Excel, but I can export it to a text file.
Thanks.

I solved this using TextMate which, once I began to understand a little regex, was simple. (details here Regex Syntax for making the last character Uppercase in TextMate)
Still, I wonder if something like sed or awk, (which I started to try out) might be a better tool. And the SQL solution that Olexa provided works. I just don't know how to have it apply to the entire recordset.

If the data is stored in MySQL, then it is better to process it there:
UPDATE addresses
SET address = CONCAT(LEFT(address, CHAR_LENGTH(address) - 1), UPPER(RIGHT(address, 1)))
WHERE address REGEXP BINARY '#[[:digit:]]+[[:lower:]]{1}$'
;
I've added BINARY because otherwise REGEXP is not case-sensitive, but BINARY may need to be omitted to support multi-byte strings. In this case, surplus updates will be made, but the result would be correct anyway.
P. S. An example on SQL Fiddle showing which values are affected, and how they are affected: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/b29326/1

Using REGEX to alter field data in a mysql query

I have two databases, both containing phone numbers. I need to find all instances of duplicate phone numbers, but the formats of database 1 vary wildly from the format of database 2.
I'd like to strip out all non-digit characters and just compare the two 10-digit strings to determine if it's a duplicate, something like:
SELECT b.phone as barPhone, sp.phone as SPPhone FROM bars b JOIN single_platform_bars sp ON sp.phone.REGEX = b.phone.REGEX
Is such a thing even possible in a mysql query? If so, how do I go about accomplishing this?
EDIT: Looks like it is, in fact, a thing you can do! Hooray! The following query returned exactly what I needed:
SELECT b.phone, b.id, sp.phone, sp.id
FROM bars b JOIN single_platform_bars sp ON REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(b.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')',''),'.','') = REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(sp.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')',''),'.','')

MySQL doesn't support returning the "match" of a regular expression. The MySQL REGEXP function returns a 1 or 0, depending on whether an expression matched a regular expression test or not.
You can use the REPLACE function to replace a specific character, and you can nest those. But it would be unwieldy for all "non-digit" characters. If you want to remove spaces, dashes, open and close parens e.g.
REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(sp.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')','')
One approach is to create user defined function to return just the digits from a string. But if you don't want to create a user defined function...
This can be done in native MySQL. This approach is a bit unwieldy, but it is workable for strings of "reasonable" length.
SELECT CONCAT(IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,1,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,1,1),'')
,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,2,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,2,1),'')
,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,3,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,3,1),'')
,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,4,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,4,1),'')
,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,5,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,5,1),'')
) AS phone_digits
FROM sp
To unpack that a bit... we extract a single character from the first position in the string, check if it's a digit, if it is a digit, we return the character, otherwise we return an empty string. We repeat this for the second, third, etc. characters in the string. We concatenate all of the returned characters and empty strings back into a single string.
Obviously, the expression above is checking only the first five characters of the string, you would need to extend this, basically adding a line for each position you want to check...
And unwieldy expressions like this can be included in a predicate (in a WHERE clause). (I've just shown it in the SELECT list for convenience.)

MySQL doesn't support such string operations natively. You will either need to use a UDF like this, or else create a stored function that iterates over a string parameter concatenating to its return value every digit that it encounters.