| The RegExpSubstitute
function This function replaces the contents of ReplaceIn by
substituting every occurrence of ReplaceWhat with ReplaceWith.
It could be something simple as replacing one word with another as in:
| Jim is John’s boss |
Pat is John’s boss |
| Where the second cell contains the formula
=RegExpSubstitute(A26,"Jim","Pat") |
Or, it could be something a little more complicated as exchanging the first
and last names and adding a comma as in:
| Jane Doe |
Doe, Jane |
| Where the second cell contains the formula
=RegExpSubstitute(A22,"(\S+)(\s+)(\S+)","$3,$2$1") |
The RegExpFind function This function returns every occurrence of
FindWhat in the contents of FindIn.
If there are multiple matches, it returns an array. Unlike Excel’s native
search functions, RegExpFind returns the matched string itself, not the
position of the match. This might not seem very useful until one realizes
that the search token is not necessarily a literal but a pattern. Hence, the
returned value is the actual text that corresponds to the pattern. For example, if a cell contains information about whether someone has a cat
or a dog as a pet and we need to know specifically which animal, the
applicable pattern would be cat|dog as in
=RegExpFind(A29,"cat|dog") and it
would yield either cat or dog. A more powerful example is extracting all the leading numbers in a cell that
contains some numbers followed by alphabetic text. The applicable pattern
would be \d*. The \d is the shorthand of any number
[0-9] and the *
indicates zero or more occurrences of the preceding token, which happens to
be a digit.
| 9809abc123 |
9809 |
| 99999xyz |
99999 |
| Where the second column contains the formula
=RegExpFind(F15,"\d*") |
|