Page 231 - Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Manipulating Data with VBA

Chapter 9

Figure 9-2. The SEARCH and MID functions, among others, let you reach into lengthy text
strings to extract the interesting parts.

Note If you are working with data where each field or cell is of a known length, you can
dispense with the calculations to determine where each substring starts.

Inside Out

Text Processing and Browser Cookies

Running a complex corporate Web site means a lot of work for the administrators and,
more often than not, a substantial cash outlay on the part of a company to get everything
looking and performing just so. Part of the administrator’s job, like it or not, is justifying the
money and time being spent on the site. And if your site doesn’t use a lot of programming,
and you’re the person who administers the site without doing a lot of programming, you
probably live in dread of being asked to process the information stored in cookies that your
Web server places on your visitors’ computers. Although programming cookies is beyond
the scope of this book, you might find a cookie with a single string where a user’s activities
are encoded in much the same manner as the order strings shown earlier in the chapter.
For example, the text of a cookie might be the string UI007589TM37900.77589, where
007589 is the visitor’s user identification and 37900.77589 is the date/time string repre­
senting the user’s last visit (which, in this case, was 10/6/2003 6:37 P.M.).

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Part 4 Advanced VBA