Case Change in Access

Uppercase & Lowercase Text

Changing the case of text in a Microsoft Access database is often required when importing data from an external source. Change case is great skill to have when once in a while you'll come across a set of data that contains all upper case letters.
When these recordsets contain names and addresses the all capital words make for a too informal address label.  Below is a simple visual basic subroutine that will switch all upper case names to mixed case, or proper case in most cases.  Learning how to do string manipulation for data parsing is an import tool to have in your knowledge base.

'  vba change case subroutine:
Public Sub change_case(iline As String)
Dim ilen As Integer
Dim i As Integer
Dim ic As Integer
Dim ispace As Boolean
Dim new_line As String
Dim Iasc(100)
Dim Inew(100)
ilen = Len(iline)
ispace = False
'
' load each letter into a VBA array
'
For i = 1 To ilen
    Iasc(i) = Asc(Mid(iline, i, 1))
Next

new_line = ""
ispace = True
'
' parse each letter and based on previous letter or space convert text to
' lower case
'
For i = 1 To ilen
    Select Case Iasc(i)
        Case 65 To 90                        ' uppercase letters
            If ispace = False Then
                Iasc(i) = Iasc(i) + 32        ' change to lowercase
            Else
                ispace = False
            End If
        Case 32                                 ' space
            ispace = True
        Case 48 To 57                        ' numbers
            ispace = False
        Case Else
            ispace = True
    End Select
    new_line = new_line & Chr(Iasc(i))    ' build the new line
Next

iline = new_line
End Sub

The change case example's basic concept is to leave all letters following a space as uppercase and change those following something else to lowercase.  Actually, the visual basic coding may be simpler by changing to upper case only letters following a space and the rest to lower case - give it a try.

ispace=0
for i=1 to len(strChangeCaseCty)
    if i=1 then
        strChangeCaseCty=ucase(mid(strChangeCaseCty,i,1)) & mid(strChangeCaseCty,i+1,len(strChangeCaseCty))
    else
        if mid(strChangeCaseCty,i,1)=" " then ispace=1
        if ispace=1 and mid(strChangeCaseCty,i,1)<>" " then
      strChangeCaseCty=mid(strChangeCaseCty,1,i-1) & ucase(mid(strChangeCaseCty,i,1)) & mid(strChangeCaseCty,i+1,len(strChangeCaseCty))
    ispace=0
    end if
end if
next

(this may only work with letters)

From this visual basic routine you can expand it to include specific VB code for special situations such as Mc, Mac, etc.

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