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Find / Extract the first character of a string

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Posted on by IMAX99

This seems like it should be simple but I just can't find a way to extract the first character of a string. There's no pattern to the strings so I cannot use split or substring. What a I need is something like Left([string],1) but I just can't see how to do this in Power Automate.

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yashag2255 24,769 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Hi @IMAX99

Can you try

substring('string',0,1)

This will return 's' in this case. You can replace the 'string' by selecting a variable output or any text output from the dynamic selector.

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IMAX99 55 on at

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Already tried that but get an error 'substring' parameter is out of range....

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yashag2255 24,769 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@IMAX99

Can you check if the string you are trying to pass actually has some text value? or is it Null? As we are extracting the first character, if the value being passed is null, it will return that error.

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IMAX99 55 on at

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The string is coming from an array. I'm using the split function to separate out the values. This working great so I know the values exist. One of these items contains a text value for a 'Company' name and what I'd like to do is extract the first character from this item.

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yashag2255 24,769 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@IMAX99

Can you share a snippet of how you are passing this value to the function?

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IMAX99 55 on at

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Design and run time with error message. This is using the expression '
substring(split(item(),',')?[0],0,1)
'
The data is coming in from a CSV file, hence the split by comma.

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