getting substring of a column value

[funandlearning]

Hi All -

My question is bit complicated to phrase it in the subject. Here are the details

I have a table like below. I want to order the result set based on the 'q2' value of column2. "q2" is url variables of the URLs in columns2. Is this possible to do in MS Access?

Column1	Column2
1	www.yahoo.com?q=1&q2=abc
2	www.yahoo.com?q=2&q2=def
3	www.google.com?q=3&q2=ghij

Thanks in advance

[pbaldy]

Two options come to mind, both using the Mid() function. First is using the InStr() function to find the position of "q2" and grabbing data from there, the second is to use InStrRev() to find the position of the last "=" and grab data from there.

[funandlearning]

Thanks for replying. There might more variables after q2 like

www.yahoo.com?q1=1&q2=abc&q3=anything

But q2 is always present.

Thanks

[pbaldy]

Ah, a moving target. You might have to write a function that finds "q2", then steps through character by character until it finds the end, presumably the "&". You'd pass the entire string to the function and it would return the desired value.