I m having a serious problem with the syntax for some string operations. What i want to do is, for example, to take a string from a text box that is a question, eg. "where is tower bridge", and i want to be able to recognise the part of the string 'where' in the question and compare the 'london bridge' with a list of sights in a db.

for example in pseudo code:

if question CONTAINS 'where is' and 'sights'

reply = "'sight' is near 'tube station'

can anyone help me with this dillema?
many thanks in advance

I'm not very clear to your question, but I think that you can use the function

InStr(string1, string2)

to check if the string2 exists in string1.

thanks for your reply, i was finding it hard to explain sorry!

i have been working on this all day,

ive got a question that is entered into a text box, eg. where is london bridge.

and ive realised that using instr i can find out where london bridge is in the sentence, if i have:

question = "where is london bridge"
Response.Write InStr(question,"london bridge")

but as you can see i have to know what the sight is to construct the statement, i want to have something like:

question = "where is london bridge"
Response.Write InStr(question,rs("sights"))

where the question is compared against a list of sights in a database. but i dont know what the correct syntax is or if there is a better way of doing it.

If I do not mis-understand your question, you want to know if the question entered by the user contains some words which are stored in database. For this case, you need a LOOP to find if the words is in the question.

<%
Do While Not theRS.EOF
If InStr(question, RS("sights")) > 0 Then
'*** do something here ***
End If
Loop
%>