Finding the Nth Occurrence of a Character

@Ryn:

Lord son, you see the various things people are asking in this one as variants of the simple idea and you still ask that question?

It is because people go off on whatever tangents based on existing work. Even if that is their own start on a problem, not someone else's spreadsheet which their boss wants no substantive changes to the logic in. Everything in life pretty much does that which is why aliens did NOT have to come around and give us all our scientific advances. We can track most all of them for the work they came out of. And see why they did not happen earlier: they couldn't be used then, by and large, with what already existed. So the spreadsheet. Even when an idea could be done without by taking a different approach, one often is somehow wed to an approach that needs it. Or a variant.

An explicit answer to this one? I, for instance, would like to use the idea to get the "fourth to the last" and "third to the last" occurrence of a character by finding how many there are altogether, then subracting 3 and 2, and finally doing something like this looking for whatever number characters those two calculations came up with. Boss doesn't like talk about our work, but perhaps someone has addresses and could do exactly that to find the 2nd and last occurrences of " " to isolate city and zip code. Or whatever. Point is, able to imagine it yourself. or not, these things are actually useful to folks.

Not the first time I've seen this question asked in here. For all you askers (let's be honest: "asker" singular) get off. Take a hike. Sneer at us non-programmers as you wish. But do it to our faces someday. That I'd like to participate in.

Am I the only person who wonders why someone would want to identify the Nth occurrence of a character within a text string? I find myself wondering this not just with this tip but with other tips as well.

Why did you use SEARCHB rather than SEARCH? I "searched" quite a while on the Internet to find out what SEARCHB was (it's not even listed as part of Excel's functions) and finally found a very slight explanation on the Microsoft site. It has to do with SEARCHB counting 2 bytes per character when using some languages, as opposed to 1 byte per character when using SEARCH. Is there a reason that this should be done in this case?

Thanks.

Interesting. I'm looking for a way to find e-mails which contain more than three occurrences of a particular string.

Could I maybe connect Excel to gmail, imort the mail and use a variation of this to find messages which contain e.g. the word 'Pega' more than three times?

Thank for your post. It saves my time.

@Shakir,
Try the following suggested formula:
(see Figure 1 below)
--------------------------
Michael (Micky) Avidan
“Microsoft® Answers" - Wiki author & Forums Moderator
“Microsoft®” MVP – Excel (2009-2016)
ISRAEL

How to repeat left 3 characters of the name(SHAKIR) 8 times in Ms excel

There is a much shorter UDF (a one-liner) available for your FindN function...

Function FindN(sFindWhat As String, sInputString As String, N As Long) As Long
FindN = InStr(Replace(sInputString, sFindWhat, " ", 1, N - 1), sFindWhat)
End Function

@Yanal

This may interest you:

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/440487-extract-text-number-column-help.html

hi

how can i extract the number between the "#" and the "-" as marked in the red below and for several times
"COST OF XO Ticket(s) # [29]
{ RJ } -- Ticket(s) # 5125838371064 - Pax = REBEKKA ROGGLI
- Ticket(s) # 5125838371065 - Pax = CHRISTOPH RIGGOLI
- Ticket(s) # 5125838371066 - Pax = NAEL ROGGLI CHD
- Ticket(s) # 5125838371067 - Pax = ELA ROGGLI CHD
- Ticket(s) # 5125838371068 - Pax = ALYA ROGGLI INF
- Ticket(s) # 5125838371069 - Pax = ANNA WINKLER
- Route = AMM/SSH/AMM
- Class ="

and if there is a macro to be used.

Thank you, for all your help and hope to fear from you soon.

@Gokulraj,
The original task was to find the position of the Nth occurrence of a character in a string AND NOT to find the position of the LAST occurrence.
--------------------------
Michael (Micky) Avidan
“Microsoft® Answers" - Wiki author & Forums Moderator
“Microsoft®” MVP – Excel (2009-2016)
ISRAEL

Just Place the below macro in Your excel as a Module Code.

Function LastpositionOfChar(strVal As String, strChar As String)

LongLastpositionOfChar = InStrRev(strVal, strChar)

End Function

@Sanjay,
Try the hereunder User Defined Function (UDF):
---------------------------------------
Function Extruct_Numbers_From_Within_Brackets(Rng As Range)
CR = 1
While CR < Len(Rng)
F1 = Application.Find("[", Rng, CR) + 1
F2 = Application.Find("]", Rng, F1) - 1
For N = F1 To F2
NM = NM + Mid(Rng, N, 1)
Next
NM = NM + ";"
CR = F2 + 1
Wend
Extruct_Numbers_From_Within_Brackets = Left(NM, Len(NM) - 1)
End Function
-----------------------
Michael (Micky) Avidan
“Microsoft® Answers" - Wiki author & Forums Moderator
“Microsoft®” MVP – Excel (2009-2015)
ISRAEL

Thanks You! Please solve my query here: I have a value in a cell A1 which contains:

M4.CTC.VA03.Verify Sales Documents.v2 [14294], MSUP.CTC.VA03.Verify Sales Documents.v2 [14957], MSUP.CTC.VA03.Verify Sales Documents.v2 [15019], MSUP.CTC.VA03.Verify Sales Documents.v3 [15156]

I would like to have a value in Cell B as: 14294;14957;15019;15156

Basically, it should look for a text "[" and then return all characters after untill reaches "]".

Please help.

wulflyng

Copy the surrounding text or complete tip to Notepad, and the hidden text will be displayed.

While using in VBA Range should be used.
[code]
Dim Ans As Integer
Ans = FindN("b", Range("C15"), 3)
MsgBox Ans
[/code]

On my system, an advertisement covers part of the first formula.

To make the search non-case sensitive, just add at the top of your VBA Module:

Option Compare Text