Excel VBA Substring

calendar_today Asked Mar 30, 2012
thumb_up 10 upvotes
history Updated April 16, 2026

Question posted 2012 · +7 upvotes

I am writing a macro that takes a list of names that are in an LDAP format converts them to First, Last (region). For those of you that do not know what LDAP looks like, it is below:

CN=John Smith (region),OU=Legal,DC=example,DC=comand

In Excel VBA, I do not appear to be able to use string.substring(start, end). A search on Google seems to reveal that Mid(string, start, end) is the best option. The problem is this: in Mid, the integer for end is the distance from start, not the actual index location of the character. This means that different name sizes will have different ending locations and I cannot use index of “)” to find the end of the region. Since all of the names start with CN=, I can find the end of the first substring properly, but I cannot find “)” properly because names are different lengths.

I have some code below:

mgrSub1 = Mid(mgrVal, InStr(1, mgrVal, "=") + 1, InStr(1, mgrVal, "") - 4)
mgrSub2 = Mid(mgrVal, InStr(1, mgrVal, ","), InStr(1, mgrVal, ")") - 10)
manager = mgrSub1 & mgrSub2

Does anyone know of a way to actually use a set end point instead of an end point that is so many values away from the start?

Accepted answer +10 upvotes

This is vba.. no string.substring 😉

this is more like VB 6 (or any one below).. so you are stuck with mid, instr, len (to get the total len of a string).. I think you missed len to get the total of chars in a string? If you need some clarification just post a comment.

edit:

Another quick hack.. 

    Dim t As String
    t = "CN=Smith, John (region),OU=Legal,DC=example,DC=comand"
    Dim s1 As String
    Dim textstart As Integer
    Dim textend As Integer
    textstart = InStr(1, t, "CN=", vbTextCompare) + 3
    textend = InStr(1, t, "(", vbTextCompare)
    s1 = Mid(t, textstart, textend - textstart)
    MsgBox s1
    textstart = InStr(1, t, "(", vbTextCompare) + 1
    textend = InStr(1, t, ")", vbTextCompare)
    s2 = Mid(t, textstart, textend - textstart)
    MsgBox s2

Clearly your problem is that since you need a diference for the second parameter, you should always do some math for it…

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