This is what I am trying to do.

0234 - someText

0235 - more 123 Text

0236 - other text

This is my list that I have ( folder names in a directory )

I know the ID "0235 -" pattern its the first word of the list.

I am trying to return the value of 2 in the above example.

I would be happy for a function to strip the list only to the first word then I can use another function to determine it's position.

Most of the position value functions out there assume the string is return sep - in my case its a 'starts with'

and I can't use a Filter() cause there could be numbers in the list.

Try =

ValueCount ( Left ( listOfValues ; Position ( ¶ & listOfValues ; ¶ & searchValue ; 1 ; 1 ) ) )

Excellent - Thank you :)

That formula is so useful. It's the one I used for Portal Sorting That Doesn’t Suck.

Maybe "ValuePosition" will be a native function in some future FileMaker.

You mean "similar". :P

Yours:

ValueCount ( Left ( listOfValues ; Position ( ¶ & listOfValues ; ¶ & searchValue ; 1 ; 1 ) ) )

Mine:

ValueCount ( Left ( ¶ & $$gIDs & ¶ ; Position ( ¶ & $$gIDs & ¶ ; ¶ & ID ; 1; 1 ) ) )

Yep, they're similar.

Well, I hope you're not suggesting I took it from you...

No worries. Anyone who takes a stab at this problem is going to arrive at more or less the same calculation (as I discovered upon searching Brian Dunning's CF site).

For anyone interested, Kevin Frank just wrote up an article about this over on filemakerhacks.com.

Anyone who takes a stab at this problem is going to arrive at more or less the same calculation

True. In fact, I thought it was too trivial to post as an independent function:

http://www.briandunning.com/cf/908