Well, I opted to do the don't care before the string was created. It adds another 3 if statements that I have to search through, but ultimately it probably won't slow the program that badly.

I'm still curious what programmatic methods there are for finding specific characters in a string. In C you can march through a for loop going from 1 to stringlength and use the CharAt command to know what everything is. Are there similar options in VBA?