Style Question about extracting data from a string?

[Rhudi]

This is really only seeking an opinion.

I have two ways of getting the data I want ( being whatever is to the left of the first space ).

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OR

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These both will return exactly what I need. Tho, the first way will give me an error if there is no " " in the string.
In the current data that I'm working with, there will always be a " " in the data and no leading space.

Here's another example, showing why I like 'Split...()(#)' more.
Imagine a line of text from a router config that has an ip address, that looks like: " ip address 192.168.0.25 255.255.255"

So:

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Alternatively, I could have used the array completely:

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Beyond that, I could further Split(sIP,".") to get the IP pieces.

Which do you think is better (And why)?

[Arkadi]

Rhudi, split will return an array containing all the elements separated by a " ", so you can turn "a b c" into 3 items in a one dimensional array. While the Left function can only be used to get the "a". If all you want is the item before the space then left is more efficient in terms of memory I suppose, but if you want all 3 (or 2, or more) items then you'd want split. Since it sounds like you only want the first part, left is better for you in this case. Since they do different things, it is not really something that can be voted as "better" in an absolute sense, but given the wider capability of Split, if you ask me to vote for one of the functions in general terms, I vote split.

The left function makes validInterface equal "a" in my example.
While split will return
validInterface(0) = "a"
validInterface(1) = "b"
validInterface(2) = "c"
by having the (0) at the end (and I presume you know this already), you are simply accessing only the first item in the array for your result, but the computer still calculates and stores the others, making it less efficient if you don't want them.

[Rhudi]

I will let you ponder this:
"There are 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't." - - - " And, those that understand Gray Binary."

[Arkadi]

lol Good point.