In the current article, I will present the way to calculate the number of chars in a string with VBA. The inspiration came from the entry exam for HackBulgaria Programming 101v3. The tasks were given some months ago, so I assume it is OK to publish my solutions for them 🙂

As far as the guys teach Python, I can bet that no one tought of resolving the tasks with VBA. Anyway, here is the problem:

ExOH

Implement a function with the following signature: ExOh(str)
str is of type string.
The function should return true if there is an equal number of x’s and o’s in str. It should return false otherwise.
Things to know:

Only these two letters will be entered in the string, no punctuation or numbers.
You don’t have to check for valid input.
You can use any language you know.

Examples:

ExOh(‘xoxoox‘) # true

ExOh(‘oooxoo‘) # false

So, what I did? Actually nothing complicated – an Array and a for-loop did the work for me pretty fast. If I had an option to use for-each for the string, it would have been actually even better. But this is VBA, so lets hate it less 🙂

This is how it looks like:

Here comes the outstanding code :

Option Explicit
Option Compare Text

Public Function ExOH(sInput As String) As Boolean
    
    Dim strArray()  As String
    
    Dim sZero       As String
    Dim sHiks       As String
    
    Dim lHiks       As Long
    Dim lZero       As Long
    Dim lCount      As Long
    
    lCount = Len(sInput)
    ReDim strArray(lCount - 1)
    
    sZero = "o"
    sHiks = "x"
    
    For lCount = 0 To lCount - 1
        strArray(lCount) = Mid(sInput, lCount + 1, 1)
        
        If CStr(strArray(lCount)) = sZero Then
            lZero = lZero + 1
        ElseIf CStr(strArray(lCount)) = sHiks Then
            lHiks = lHiks + 1
        End If
        
    Next lCount
    
    ExOH = (lHiks > 0) And (lHiks = lZero)

End Function

Enjoy it!

VBA – Count the Number of Chars in a String

ExOH