Extract Multiple occurances of text between characters in a String

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Posted on 11 May 2020 14:51:49 by stuax

Hi,

I have a string that looks like this:

"Hello [contact.first], Blah Blah Blah [contact.dob] blah blah blah [contact.phone] bah blah."

If I wanted to grab every occurrence of [ ] and essentially loop through each, whats the best way to do it? There will always be one [ ] but they might be different and be different order etc.

I know I can get the contents between one occurrence but not sure how to get to each one.

Many thanks.

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Ed Gonzales 4,531 Most Valuable Professional on 12 May 2020 at 02:58:26

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Re: Extract Multiple occurances of text between characters in a String

@stuax

Hey there - So this isn't the prettiest, but it's what I got:

What I did was replace all of the open brackets with something else like "[**" (you'll see why later).

Then I replaced all of the close brackets with open brackets.

Then, I did a split() on the open bracket. This created an array with a bunch of junk, but the things I want to keep all start with "**".

[

  "Hello ",

  "**contact.first",

  ", Blah Blah Blah ",

  "**contact.dob",

  " blah blah blah ",

  "**contact.phone",

  " bah blah"

]

Here's the expression I used (replace the bold bit with your actual data):

split(replace(replace(outputs('Compose'),'[','[**'),']','['),'[')

To filter out the ** stuff, add a step "Filter Array", put the output from that expression as the Array, and then for the value, just put "item()" and change the operator to "Starts with" and then "**" (all without quotes) like this:

That output should be:

[

  "**contact.first",

  "**contact.dob",

  "**contact.phone"

]

And so then you can just do a Replace() to change the ** to nothing ('').

If stuff is never in the same order, I'm not certain how you'll assign those values to actual fields, but I presume you've already worked that out.

Keep us posted.

-Ed

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