Left, Mid and Right

Splitting a String at Specific Points Using Left, Mid and Right

We saw that the Split function can chop up a string and create an array of the individual components.  The Left, Mid and Right functions are useful for extracting specific information from a given string

Syntax
Left(String, Position)
Mid(String, Position)
Right(String, Position)

Return Value
The left function will return all characters to the left of a specified point within a string
The Mid function will return all characters to the right of a specified point within a string
The Right function will return the specified number of rightmost characters from a given string

Usage
These functions may be used in conjunction with InStr to locate substrings within a given string and chop up the original string to "dig out" a specified string.  For Example, imagine we used the example above to recover the filename from the full path, we can recover just the file extension using the Right function:

Dim strFileExtension As String
strFileExtension = Right(strFileName, 3)

or we can remove the file extension to leave just the filename by calculating the position of the full stop, note that it is necessary to use the -1 because InStr(1, strFileName, ".") would include the full stop in the filename as well 

strFileName = Left(strFileName, InStr(1, strFileName, ".") - 1)

This is only an example, in the real-world you would probably use the FSO to accomplish this, it was only intended as a demonstration of how strings may be chopped of at specific points.