Where's the extra character space coming from?

[21st Century Man]

Howdy all:

I'm using this calculation to parse the department from a character string:

 

Let (

db = District_Building__lxt ;

If (

PatternCount ( db ; "Columbus Public - High School" ) or

PatternCount ( db ; "ESU 7" ) or

PatternCount ( db ; "Columbus Public - Kramer" ) ;

Let ( [

len = Length ( db ) ;

lastSpace = Position ( db ; "-" ; len ; -1 )

] ;

Right ( db ; len - lastSpace  )    

     )  

   )

)

 

The calculation works, but curiously it inserts a character space at the beginning of the output of the calculation. How can i filter/calculate it out?

Here are some samples of the text I'm using to parse from:

Columbus Public - High School - Industrial Education

ESU 7 - Learning Academy

Columbus Public - Kramer Education Center

 

 

[comment]

49 minutes ago, 21st Century Man said:

 Where's the extra character space coming from?

The space character is the character immediately after the last hyphen in the text.

Suppose the text were just: "a - b".
The length of this text is is 5, and the position of the hyphen is 3.
5 - 3 = 2, so your expression:

Right ( db ; len - lastSpace ) 

will return the last two characters of the text, i.e. " b".

 

49 minutes ago, 21st Century Man said:

How can i filter/calculate it out?

It depends. If the hyphen separator is always followed by a space, you might simply subtract it:

Right ( db ; len - lastSpace - 1 ) 

A better solution would look for the position of the entire separator pattern " - " (a hyphen surrounded by spaces) and do:

Let ( [
len = Length ( db ) ;
lastSeparator = Position ( db ; " - " ; len ; -1 )
] ;
Right ( db ; len - lastSeparator - 2  )    
)  

This would allow you to correctly extract "Carter-Brown" from "Smith - Jones - Carter-Brown".
 

If you cannot be sure the space/s will always be there, you may use Trim() on the result (this is assuming the extracted portion will not contain any significant whitespace characters).