VBA Greater Than Function Not Working - string

Question

I have an issue where I am trying to compare a values that can be alphanumeric, only numeric, or only alphabetic.
The code originally worked fine for comparing anything within the same 100s group (IE 1-99 with alphabetic components). However when I included 100+ into it, it malfunctioned.
The current part of the code reads:
For j = 1 To thislength
If lennew < j Then
enteredval = Left("100A", lennew)
ElseIf lennew >= j Then
enteredval = Left("100A", j)
End If
If lenold < j Then
cellval = Left("67", lenold)
ElseIf lenold >= j Then
cellval = Left("67", j)
End If
'issue occurs here
If enteredval >= cellval Then
newrow = newrow+1
End If
Next j
The issue occurs in the last if statement.
When cycling through the 100 is greater than the 67 but still skips over. I tried to declare them both as strings (above this part of code) to see if that would help but it didn't.
What I am trying to accomplish is to sort through a bunch of rows and find where it should go. IE the 100A should go between 100 and 100B.
Sorry lennew=len("100A") and lennold=len("67"). And thislength=4or whatever is larger of the two lengths.

Answer 1

The problem is that you're trying to solve the comparison problem by attacking specific values, and that's going to be a problem to maintain. I'd make the problem more generic by creating a function that supplies takes two values returns -1 if the first operand is "before" the second, 0 if they are the same, and 1 if the first operand is "after" the second per your rules.
You could then restructure your code to eliminate the specific hardcoded prefix testing and then just call the comparison function directly, eg (and this is COMPLETELY untested, off-the-cuff, and my VBA is VERRRRRY stale :) but the idea is there: (it also assumes the existence of a simple string function called StripPrefix that just takes a string and strips off any leading digits, which I suspect you can spin up fairly readily yourself)
Function CompareCell(Cell1 as String, Cell2 as String) as Integer
Dim result as integer
Dim suffix1 as string
Dim suffix2 as string
if val(cell1)< val(cell2) Then
result = -1
else if val(cell1)>val(cell2) then
result = 1
else if val(cell1)=val(cell2) then
if len(cell1)=len(cell2) then
result =0
else
' write code to strip leading numeric prefixes
' You must supply StripPrefix, but it's pretty simple
' I just omitted it here for clarity
suffix1=StripPrefix(cell1) ' eg returns "ABC" for "1000ABC"
suffix2=StripPrefix(cell2)
if suffix1 < suffix2 then
result = -1
else if suffix1 > suffix2 then
result = 1
else
result = 0
end if
end if
return result
end function
A function like this then allows you to take any two cell references and compare them directly to make whatever decision you need:
if CompareCell(enteredval,newval)>=0 then
newrow=newrow+1
end if