I need a substring query that will return certain values from a character string

[Ken Jones]

Table URL_3 consist of the following 2 columns of information being Record No and URL

No                         URL
1   http:/publishing/45/100006_f.SAL_Local.html
2   http:/publishing/45/100006_f.SAL_Area.html

I need a substring query that will return the values of Local and Area from column URL of Table URL_3 into an additional column of information.
I was looking for the solution, shown below, that tried to delimit the desired values of the underscore(_) and the period(.) that preceeded and followed the desire values of Local and Area that I was trying to extract. I could not get this query to work and was hoping it could be made to work. I would appreciate any solution to this problem

SELECT Right([URL],InStr([URL],_  .)-1) 
FROM URL_3;

[NeoPa]

Try :

SELECT [No]
     , [URL]
     , Mid([URL], 
           InStr(1, [URL], 'SAL_') + 4, 
           InStr(1, [URL], '.html') -
           InStr(1, [URL], 'SAL_') - 4) AS URLBit
FROM   [URL_3]

[Mariostg]

Under the assumtions that it is either Area or Local, the following could work too:

SELECT IIf(InStr(URL,"Local"),"Local","Area") AS MyString
FROM URL_3;