Can AutoFilter take both inclusive and non-inclusive wildcards from Dictionary keys?

Question

I have been looking for a way to filter an Excel spreadsheet with more than two wildcards. I asked on StackOverflow previously if I could put more than two wildcards in to A

Answer 1

I'm going to stick to the ! prefix for the discards as that is a single character.

    Dim h As Long, hstr As String   'put these at the top with the other var declarations

    For v = LBound(vVALs, 1) To UBound(vVALs, 1)
        For h = LBound(hierArray) To UBound(hierArray)   'I just prefer to work this way
            hstr = hierArray(h) & Chr(42)   'stick a * on the end
            If Left(hstr, 1) = Chr(33) And LCase(vVALs(v, 1)) Like LCase(Mid(hstr, 2)) Then     'starts with a ! and pattern matches the value
                'matched a discard pattern. check to see if it was previously added
                If dVALs.Exists(vVALs(v, 1)) Then _
                    dVALs.Remove vVALs(v, 1)    'get rid of it
                Exit For  'discarded. do not keep checking to add
            ElseIf LCase(vVALs(v, 1)) Like LCase(hstr) Then
                If NOT dVALs.Exists(vVALs(v, 1)) Then _
                    dVALs.Add Key:=vVALs(v, 1), Item:=vVALs(v, 1)
            End If
        Next h
    Next v

When creating the hierArray string, you can save a few cycles by putting the discard patterns first. That way, they will not get added and then subsequently removed.

Any further work in this areas would likely warrant switching to a full Regular Expression (regexp) pattern matching method.