使用Excel VBA在单元格中的某些文本周围插入方括号

Question

Is it possible to insert square brackets around some text in a cell with Excel VBA code, where there is none?

It needs to find the text before the first comma and if there are no square brackets before the first comma, wrap it with [ ] square brackets

The text in cell A is in this format. It is all in one single text string

A12345, blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[B45678], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
C97665, blah, blah, blah, blah blah
D89798, blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[B97494], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
Y34987, blah, blah, blah, blah blah

I need to run it into

[A12345], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[B45678], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[C97665], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[D89798], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[B97494], blah, blah, blah, blah blah
[Y34987], blah, blah, blah, blah blah

I have no VBA knowledge but thought it would be best handled using VBA as there could be thousands of rows

Answer 1

With data like:

Running this small macro:

Sub bracket()
    Dim r As Range, N As Long, s As String
    Dim i As Long

    N = Cells(Rows.Count, "A").End(xlUp).Row

    For i = 1 To N
        ary = Split(Cells(i, 1).Text, ",")
        If Left(ary(0), 1) = "[" Then
        Else
            ary(0) = "[" & ary(0) & "]"
            Cells(i, 1).Value = Join(ary, ",")
        End If
    Next i
End Sub

will produce:

EDIT#1:

To adapt the original code to work with data in column E we need to change 3 lines of code:

Sub bracket()
    Dim r As Range, N As Long, s As String
    Dim i As Long

    N = Cells(Rows.Count, "E").End(xlUp).Row

    For i = 1 To N
        ary = Split(Cells(i, 5).Text, ",")
        If Left(ary(0), 1) = "[" Then
        Else
            ary(0) = "[" & ary(0) & "]"
            Cells(i, 5).Value = Join(ary, ",")
        End If
    Next i
End Sub

this is because Cells(13,1) refers to cell A13 , and Cells(13,5) would refer to cell E13 .