I have an 2-column excel file that I'm importing into FileMaker. The columns are

Date

Description

After the import, in a third column:

Type

I want to display a shortened description based on the one imported.

e.g. if imported description is:

Safeway PMNT 00554 XLD 01/01/07

the short description would be:

Groceries

BUT the tricky part is that i want to base the parsing on another table. That is, there will be another table that has 2 fields:

Keyword (in our case a record would show Safeway)

Type (in our case it would be Groceries).

Thanks

Will the keyword always be the first word in imported description?

unfortunately, no. There's no real pattern i can come up with... I'm trying to parse statement entries (they differ from bank to bank and can also change from month to month)... I wish there were some way of doing a patterncount with wildcards or maybe there's another way...

It's difficult when there are no rules. Perhaps you could try something like:

Substitute ( Description ; " " ; ¶ )

This would break each word into a line by itself, allowing you to use this as a matchfield to the Types table. Assuming no single description will contain more than one keyword.

That's close enough!

I will do a few substitutions on the description field (on chars such as " " and "#") and that should bring me close enough to what i need.

Thanks!