Removing duplicates within a cell - excel

Question

I can't find a way to remove duplicate values inside a same cell in Excel. For example, in A1, I have:
DOG DOG DOG
I want to have only DOG.
Code output: This will result certain values in the Excel cell (37, 4), such as:
2000 3000 0300 0300 2000
I am lost as to how to delete the repeated values in the cell.

Answer 1

You can use a regex with a backreference to match duplicated words or phrases. The nongreedy pattern ^(.+?)\s(\1\s*)+$ will match any duplicating phrase with whitespace in between.
Function RemoveDupes(strText)
With New RegExp
.Pattern = "^(.+?)\s(\1\s*)+$"
If .Test(strText) Then RemoveDupes = .Replace(strText, "$1")
End With
End Function
Tests:
WScript.Echo RemoveDupes("Dog Cat Dog Cat") ' => Dog Cat
WScript.Echo RemoveDupes("Dog Dog") ' => Dog
WScript.Echo RemoveDupes("Dog Dog Dog") ' => Dog
WScript.Echo RemoveDupes("Dog Dog Dog Dog") ' => Dog
WScript.Echo RemoveDupes("Dog Cat Dog Cat Dog Cat") ' => Dog Cat
Edit:
I see you've added some additional examples that don't repeat perfectly as your original examples did. In that case, you'll need to use an alternative method. If your values are always separated by a space, consider splitting your values into an array and storing them into a Dictionary to keep track of unique values. For example:
Dim d, a, i
Set d = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
a = Split(objExcel.ActiveSheet.Range("A1"), " ")
For i = 0 To UBound(a)
If Not d.Exists(a(i)) Then d.Add a(i), ""
Next
Now your Dictionary should have unique values from your cell and you can recombine them:
objExcel.ActiveSheet.Range("A1") = Join(d.Keys, " ")

Answer 2

Should be something like... We need to know where the space is between DOG DOG..
Excel:
=LEFT(A1,SEARCH(" ",A1)-1)
VBS:
Left(string, length)
Ref. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sk3xcs8k%28v=vs.84%29.aspx
InStr:
SOMESTRING = "DOG DOG DOG"
InStr (1, SOMESTRING, " ") '-- look for the position of the space
Ref. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wybb344c%28v=vs.84%29.aspx
Putting the two together we get:
SOMESTRING = "DOG DOG DOG"
RESULTS = Left(SOMESTRING, InStr (1, SOMESTRING, " ")-1)
Hope this helps!