Replace Property

Sets a string to replace all matches.

Syntax

[form!]VSFlexString.Replace = value As String

Remarks

The replacement occurs as soon as you assign the new text to the Replace property. To perform the replacement on several strings, you must set both the Text and Replace properties for each string you want to modify.

For example:

 fs.Text = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

 fs.Pattern = " [fd][a-z]*"

 fs.Replace = " animal"

 Debug.Print fs.Text

This code produces the following output:

The quick brown animal jumped over the lazy animal.

The Replace property is particularly useful for changing marked up text documents such as HTML or XML. For example, the code below converts bold HTML text into bold underlined text:

    fs = "<P>This is some <B>HTML</B> text.</P>"

    fs.CaseSensitive = False

    fs.Pattern = "<B>"

    fs.Replace = "<B><U>"

    fs.Pattern = "</B>"

    fs.Replace = "</U></B>"

    Debug.Print fs

This code produces the following output:

<P>This is some <B><U>HTML</U></B> text.</P>

The Replace string may contain tags, specified using curly brackets with the tag number between them, for example, "{n}". The tags expand into the portions of the original Text string that were matched to the corresponding tags in the search Pattern. The example below illustrates this:

' set up a pattern to search for a filename and extension:

' the curly brackets define two tags

' (note how the period is escaped with a backslash)

    fs.Pattern = "{[A-Za-z0-9_]+}\.{...}"

' assign a string to be matched against the pattern

' tag 0 will match the filename, tag 1 the extension

    fs.Text = "AUTOEXEC.BAT"

' expand the string (note that each tag may be used several times)

    fs.Replace = "File {0}.{1}, Name: {0}, Ext: {1}"

    Debug.Print fs.Text

This code produces the following output:

File AUTOEXEC.BAT, Name: AUTOEXEC, Ext: BAT

Data Type

String

See Also

VSFlexString Control