How to Remove Stop Words from a string using Visual Basic? - ms-access

Question

I'm looking to find a way to remove stop words using a function in Visual Basic inside my Access DB.
Today I'm just doing several replace but I know it's not the right way as I wouldn't know if I'm removing the Stop Word as a word or within a word.
Any help would be great, I just cannot find any way to do this on VB.

Answer 1

Okay, you mean something like this, right?
OutputString = Replace("They answered the question", "the", "")
This replaces all occurrences of "the" from the phrase, including part of the word "They".
The simplest solution would be to put spaces before and after the word to replace:
OutputString = Replace("They answered the question", " the ", "")
This works for the phrase in my above example, but it won't work when the word occurs at the beginning or at the end of the phrase.
For these cases, you need to do more. Something like this:
Public Function RemoveStopWords( _
ByVal Phrase As String, _
ByVal WordToRemove As String _
) As String
Dim RetVal As String
Dim Tmp As String
'remove the word in the middle of the phrase
RetVal = Replace(Phrase, " " & WordToRemove & " ", " ")
'remove the word at the beginning
Tmp = WordToRemove & " "
If Left(RetVal, Len(Tmp)) = Tmp Then
RetVal = Mid(RetVal, Len(Tmp) + 1)
End If
'remove the word at the end
Tmp = " " & WordToRemove
If Right(RetVal, Len(Tmp)) = Tmp Then
RetVal = Left(RetVal, Len(RetVal) - Len(Tmp))
End If
RemoveStopWords = RetVal
End Function
This works as long as the words in the phrase are always separated with blanks.
When there can be other separators than blanks, you have to do even more.
For example, instead of hardcoding the blanks in the function, you could loop over a list of separators and execute the function for each one.
I won't show this as code now, but you get the idea.