Quote Originally Posted by kenhigg
Do they always appear as:

"CR 1234: blah blah blah"
"CR 1234a: blah blah blah"
"CR 1235: blah blah blah").
"CR 1236: blah blah blah").
"CR 1234b: blah blah blah").
Almost always. Well, let me rephrase that: they're SUPPOSED to. The users don't always use that format. I've been thinking that it might help if I:
(a) reformatted all existing records to have that format
(b) put some kind of default value or input mask on the field that strongly urges them to enter it in that format.

Because it might help if you always knew that you were examining the string starting from character #4 and going to either character#7 or #8.

But the problem gets worse, because not *all* the ID numbers are ####[a], only *most*. Sometimes IDs are weird things like SOP24a -- and before you ask, I and my users have no control over these ID numbers, they are given to use by outside agencies, so I unfortunately cannot standardize them. Blech.