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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / extract s string betwe...
Power Automate
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extract s string between two characters

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Posted on by Microsoft Employee

How to extract string between two Characters.

 

Example: String = abc@123|def

Here the two characters @ and |

 

Dsired Output : 123

 

 

 

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  • Verified answer
    DouglasRomao Profile Picture
    224 Most Valuable Professional on at

    Hi @Anonymous,

     

    I used 4 Compose actions to do that, it´s a combination of some expressions that I will explain to you:

     

    1.png

     

     

     

    First of all, we need to use the IndexOf expression to get which is the position of the @ and | character, so I added a compose action to get this:

     

    To get the @ position, I used the below expression:

     

    add(int(indexOf('abc@123|def', '@')), 1)
     

     2.png

        

    This expression will get the index of the '@' character on my text and add 1, this sum will return to us the properly character that we need to get the information.
     
    The result of this expression will be 4, that is the character 1 of our string.
     
    Now, we will do the same thing to '|' character, but we don´t need use the add expression in this case, the expression will be:
     
    int(indexOf('abc@123|def', '|'))
     
     3.png

      

    The result of this expression will be 7, that is the character | of our string.
     
    Now, we are going to create a compose action to get how many characters are between the two characters ('@' and "|'), we are going to use the below expression to do that:
     
    sub(outputs('Get_IndexOf_|'),outputs('Get_IndexOf_@'))
     
     4.png

     

    The result of this action, will be that is how many characters are between the two characters.
     
    Now, we just have to add a new compose action to use substring expression to get the parse information for our string. The expression will be:
     
    substring('abc@123|def', outputs('Get_IndexOf_@'),outputs('Get_Last_index'))
     
    1.png

     

    We are using the substring to get from a string the start index and the lenght of characters that we want to get. 
     
    The result will be "123":
     
    1.png

     

     
  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    @douglasromao Thanks. it worked .

  • Alerodri Profile Picture
    25 on at

    Thanks @douglasromao, You made my Day. It also worked for me!

  • Jasonkatz424 Profile Picture
    71 on at

    Props to you, this is great.  Thanks so much.

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    douglasromao, 

     

    Great solution!  I was hoping you might be able to help me understand why it won't work for me?  Everytime I run the flow it gives me a -1 value for the index position..... Can't seem to find out why.  I've tried it with html body and html_to_text versions and get the same result. See below: 

     

    Below I am converting and HTML email to text and attempting to parse certain information - in this case the URL that is highlighted:

     
    Command inputs:
     
    add(int(indexOf('html_to_text', 'URL: ')), 1)
     
    int(indexOf('html_to_text', ' To'))
     
    Source:
     
     
     
    Result:
     
     
    Hoping this is an easy fix.  Thanks for any help you can offer!
  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    I found a simpler one-step solution to this. You could split the string by the second delimiter, get the first part of the array, then split that item by your first delimiter and get the last part of the array. 

     

    String = 'abc@123|def'

     

    first(split('abc@123|def','|')) = 'abc@123'

    last(split('abc@123'),'@') = '123'

     

    so, last(split(first(split('abc@123|def','|')),'@')) = 123

     

    this post goes into more detail.

  • gmurnock Profile Picture
    57 on at

    I used this method and it works AWESOME!  Thank you!

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    Please help me i'm trying to do something very similar but instead of keeping whatever is between the delimiters I want to remove it.

     

    E.g.  I have a string:

     

    Reconsider your need to travel [/consular-services/travel-advice-explained] due to the volatile security situation and the high risk that foreigners, including Australians, could be arbitrarily detained or arrested. Dual nationals are also at risk.

     

    I want to remove everything between and including the [ and ] delimiters.  I.e. remove this [/consular-services/travel-advice-explained]

     

    I can do it with 2 splits and the concatenate the results together but I need to put this into many flows so if I can achieve it in one step would be awesome.

     

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    I have a file like "abc1099.i_have_a_file_123456_001.txt"  where I want to extract last 10 digits of the number before the "." (period)

    Output I am expecting is "123456_001"

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    what if you get the url value from initialise variable. and then use this to index .

     

    This gives error

     

    add(int(indexOf('variables('URL')''ID=')), 1)

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