Check a field for a single letter

Question

With AMPscript is there any way to check a field to see if it has one letter in it? For example, in the first name field examples below, could I detect that there is a single J in that field? I don't need to know that it is a J, but just a single letter?

John J

J John

Answer 1

Based off of the info from the comments mentioning this has to be done in email in 'real time', the easiest way I can think of to test this via AMPscript is to do the following:

1. Set the string into an AMPscript variable
2. Build a rowset from that string using space as the delimiter
3. Iterate through the rowset and count the length of each row
4. If you find a row with a count of 1 - set an ampscript var as a flag
5. Use that flag for deciding which salutation to use.

For example:

%%[
  SET @flag = 0
  SET @fName = AttributeValue("FirstName")
  SET @fName_RS = BuildRowsetFromString(@fName," ")
  
  FOR @i=1 TO RowCount(@fName_RS) DO
    SET @fName_R = Row(@fName_RS,@i)
    SET @temp = Field(@fName_R,1)
    SET @length = Length(@temp)
    
    IF @length == 1 THEN
      SET @flag = 1
    ENDIF
  NEXT @i

  IF @flag == 1 THEN
    SET @salutation = "One letter variant"
  ELSE
    SET @salutation = "Other version"
  ENDIF
]%%