Return a substring containing a certain pattern to VBA

Question

I've written in a C++ dll the following function to return to VBA a substring containing a certain pattern, given an input string, which contains that substring:

VARIANT _stdcall ReturnT(VARIANT FileName)
{

    wstring str(FileName.bstrVal, SysStringLen(FileName.bstrVal));
    wregex ToFind(L"_[tT]\\d{2,3}(_|.)");
    wsmatch TStr;

    regex_search(str, TStr, ToFind);
    wstring TVal = TStr.str(0).erase(0, 2);
    TVal.erase(TVal.end() - 1);

    assert(!TVal.empty());
    BSTR bs = SysAllocStringLen(TVal.data(), TVal.size());

    VARIANT TValue;
    TValue.vt = VT_BSTR;
    TValue.bstrVal = bs;

    return TValue;
}

This works flawlessly, but I suspect I am doing something more complicated than it really should be.

Notice that I'm using VARIANT to avoid interop problems ( BSTR as input would return kanjis, and in output would return a string with spaces between the characters)

Answer 1

String Operations

regex_search provides various overloads for various input types. You don't need to copy the data into a wstring just to pass it to regex_search.

Since the return string is only a substring of the original, you can simply construct the BSTR from part of the match value, avoiding the erase calls.

ATL

Microsoft's ATL library provides a lot of helper classes for dealing with COM. They can eliminate a lot of boilerplate code.

Regex Library

I haven't used VBA lately but I expect something as common as regular expressions to already be available. If not, I would probably expose COM classes wrapping regex functionality to VBA and keep the actual expressions in VBA closer to the rest of the business code.