I'm trying to write a simple function that returns the gender (male/female/unknown) based on searches within a paragraph of biographical text for clues such as "he" and "she".

I've devised this basic function:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.
but there are a couple of problems:

1. If the first SEARCH function fails, the entire function returns !#VALUE. How can I avoid this fatal error and simply treat the error as a FALSE value (I don't understand why this isn't the default behavior).

2. the SEARCH function returns TRUE for a match like "hero" when searching for "he", while I only want to search for something like "He ..." or "... he ...", ie. as words standing alone only.

Thanks for any help.