Excel VBA + Regular Expression - regex

Question

Ok, to start. I'm a little rusty on VBA, 3 + years since Ive need to use it.
In short, im struggling to extract text from a string. Im using regular expression to extract my department name and date from this string.
The Department will always fall between : and -.
I can't share the document due to security. But, I can explain the format and hopefully we can work from that.
Col A----Col B----Col C---Col D
Date(e)--Dept(e)--String--Duration
Where (e) means it was extracted from the string.
My code for the extraction, thus far, is below. Currently it will loop through all available rows and extract the department, but it always take the : and - with it! I can't seem to find a way to cut these out.
Any assistance?
I can probably work out the date bit eventually.
The final output from this code is ": Inbound Contacts -"
Where I need, "Inbound Contacts".
Sub stringSearch()
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim lastRow As Long, x As Long
Dim matches As Variant, match As Variant
Dim Reg_Exp As Object
Set Reg_Exp = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
Reg_Exp.Pattern = "\:\s(\w.+)\s\-"
Set ws = Sheet2
lastRow = ws.Range("C" & Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
For x = 1 To lastRow
Set matches = Reg_Exp.Execute(CStr(ws.Range("C" & x).Value))
If matches.Count > 0 Then
For Each match In matches
ws.Range("B" & x).Value = match.Value
Next match
End If
Next x
End Sub

Answer 1

This is how to achieve what you want without regex, in general it should be a bit faster and way more understandable:
Sub TestMe()
Dim inputString As String
inputString = "Planning Unit: Inbound Contacts = Tuesday, 27/03/2018"
Debug.Print Split(Split(inputString, ":")(1), "=")(0)
End Sub
split the inputString by : and take the second part;
split the taken part by = and take the first part;

Answer 2

You are not accessing Group 1 value.
Instead of ws.Range("B" & x).Value = match.Value use
ws.Range("B" & x).Value = match.Submatches(0)
You may also enhance the regex a bit to
Reg_Exp.Pattern = ":\s*(\w.*?)\s*-"
This way, you will "trim" the Group 1 value. See the regex demo.
Details
: - a : char
\s* - 0+ whitespace chars
(\w.*?) - Group 1 (.Submatches(0)): a word char followed with any 0+ chars (other than line break chars) as few as possible (NOTE that \w does not match non-ASCII letters, probably you want to match any char that is not whitespace and not a -, then use [^\s-] instead of \w)
\s* - 0+ whitespace chars
- - a hyphen.

Answer 3

Regex:
You can use this Regex: ([\s\S]+?):\s*([\s\S]+?)\s*-\s*([A-z]+)\s*,\s*([0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{4})\b
And the demo
Code:
And this code:
Sub stringSearch()
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim lastRow As Long, x As Long
Dim matches As Variant, match As Variant
Dim Reg_Exp As Object
Set Reg_Exp = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
Reg_Exp.Pattern = "([\s\S]+?):\s*([\s\S]+?)\s*-\s*([A-z]+)\s*,\s*([0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{4})\b"
Set ws = Sheet2
lastRow = ws.Range("C" & Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
For x = 1 To lastRow
Set matches = Reg_Exp.Execute(CStr(ws.Range("C" & x).Value))
If matches.Count > 0 Then
For Each match In matches
For i = 0 To match.SubMatches.Count - 1
Debug.Print match.SubMatches(i)
Next i
Next match
End If
Next x
End Sub
Result
This is the result on the immediate window:
+-------------------+
| Planning Unit |
| Inbound Contracts |
| Tuesday |
| 27/03/2018 |
| Planning Unit |
| Payments & Orders |
| Tuesday |
| 27/03/2018 |
| Planning Unit |
| Scheduling |
| Tuesday |
| 27/03/2018 |
+-------------------+

Answer 4

I'd use Left/Right/Mid and InStr/InStrRev instead of RegEx in this case.
For extracting the department:
Dim mainStr As String
Dim deptStr As String
mainStr = "Planning Unit: Inbound Contacts - Tuesday, 27/03/2018"
deptStr = Mid(mainStr, InStr(mainStr, ":") + 2)
deptStr = Left(deptStr, InStr(deptStr, "-") - 2)
For extracting the date:
Dim mainStr As String
Dim dateStr As String
mainStr = "Planning Unit: Inbound Contacts - Tuesday, 27/03/2018"
dateStr = Right(mainStr, Len(mainStr) - InStrRev(mainStr, " "))
To be honest, this kind of situation is common enough that you might want to write some sort of "extractText" function to get the text between delimiters. Here's the one I use.
Function extractText(str As String, leftDelim As String, rightDelim As String, _
Optional reverseSearch As Boolean = False) As String
'Extracts text between two delimiters in a string
'By default, searches for first instance of each delimiter in string from left to right
'To search from right to left, set reverseSearch = True
'If left delimiter = "", function returns text up to right delimiter
'If right delimiter = "", function returns text after left delimiter
'If left or right delimiter not found in string, function returns empty string
Dim leftPos As Long
Dim rightPos As Long
Dim leftLen As Long
If reverseSearch Then
leftPos = InStrRev(str, leftDelim)
rightPos = InStrRev(str, rightDelim)
Else
leftPos = InStr(str, leftDelim)
rightPos = InStr(str, rightDelim)
End If
leftPos = IIf(leftDelim = "", -1, leftPos)
rightPos = IIf(rightDelim = "", -1, rightPos)
leftLen = Len(leftDelim)
If leftPos > 0 Then
If rightPos = -1 Then
extractText = Mid(str, leftPos + leftLen)
ElseIf rightPos > leftPos Then
extractText = Mid(str, leftPos + leftLen, rightPos - leftPos - leftLen)
End If
ElseIf leftPos = -1 Then
If rightPos > 0 Then
extractText = Left(str, rightPos - 1)
End If
End If
End Function