Remove wildcard characters from string

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1

Just starting out. I’m iterating a dataTable and want to strip middle initials from names. String.Replace, of course, does not support wildcards.

I.E.:
Gorgeous George
Billy F Gibbons
Marlin Perkins
Abraham van Helsing
Johnny B Goode

To:
Gorgeous George
Billy Gibbons
Marlin Perkins
Abraham van Helsing
Johnny Goode

Ultimately the aim is to invert these and sort on the last name:
George, Gorgeous
Gibbons, Billy
Goode, Johnny
Perkins, Marlin
van Helsing, Abraham

To make this practical, it seems that the first step needs to be to strip out those initials.

ddk

2

Hey.

So I’m going to assume you need to remove the middle Initial then place last name first with a comma.

I will use row(0).ToString to represent the value for the name inside a ForEach loop:

 Assign row(0) = String.Join(" ",System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(row(0).ToString," [A-Z] "," ").Split(" "c).Skip(1))+", "+System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(row(0).ToString," [A-Z] "," ").Split(" "c)(0)

Basically, I replaced the Initial (assuming it’s always in the pattern " A ", then performed a Split and took the first word and placed it on the end.

I tested this solution with your examples and seemed to work.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

C

3 Likes
3

Yes!!! That works a charm! Thanks so much. Would’ve taken me forever to dope that out!

ddk