delimiters with text functions

[shirokuma]

I do development with both Japanese and English versions of Filemaker. I have noticed that in the English version the delimiter for a "word" can be any non-alphanumeric character. This is causing a problem because some time my data contains hyphens and other punctuation. This means that if the data in some_fields is "s-1-5-21 some more data) the text function leftwords(some_field, 1, 1) will return "s" instead of "s-1-5-21". In Japanese, the function will return the proper string but not in English. Is there a way around this?

Regards,

shirokuma

[QuinTech]

Hi, Shirokuma, and welcome to FM Forums! If you update the FM version you're using, we could help you more easily. Namely, if you're using version 7, you could use LeftWords ( Filter ( some_field , "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890" ) , 1 , 1 ) to return only the first word of the string after stripping it of non-alphanumeric characters.

Does this help?

Jerry

[Lee Smith]

Hi Shirokuma,

For versions before 7, you could use something like this:

LeftWords(Substitute(Substitute(Text Field, "-", ""), ".", ""), 1)

Just add another Substitute for any other character you want to remove.

HTH

Lee

[JCho]

I had a question on LeftWord() or another method.

If(Value1 = Value2, value2, "$"& Value1 & "-"& "$"& Value2) the problem is I can't get the comma to show thousands in Value1 and in Value2. Can any help me to find out how to insert a comma in a caluation in two different values

[-Queue-]

Case( Value1 = Value2, Value2, "$" & Case( Length(Value1) > 3, Left( Value1, Length(Value1) - 3 ) & "," ) & Right( Value1, 3 ) & "-" & "$" & Case( Length(Value2) > 3, Left( Value2, Length(Value2) - 3 ) & "," ) & Right( Value2, 3 ) )