MapInfo Removing Special Characters

Posted on August 18th 2011 by Mr Chimp

I needed to remove all characters except letters and numbers from a string in the joyful language that is MapBasic. Might not be the most efficient way of doing it but it works doesn’t it?

Function RemoveSpecialChars(byval str as string) as String
    Dim chr, out, nicechars as String
    Dim i, l as Integer

    nicechars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"
    l = Len(str)

    For i = 1 to l
        chr = Mid$(str, i, 1)
        If InStr(1, nicechars, chr) &gt; 0 Then
            out = out + chr
        End If
    Next

    RemoveSpecialChars = out
End Function