Monday, February 10, 2014

File Path manipulation in Excel

Saw this over at stackoverflow. Had to make a note of it for future reference.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18617349/excel-last-character-string-match-in-a-string


Let's say for example you want the right-most \ in the following string (which is stored in cell A1):
Drive:\Folder\SubFolder\Filename.ext
To get the position of the last \, you would use this formula:
=FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","@",(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","")))/LEN("\")))
That tells us the right-most \ is at character 24. It does this by looking for "@" and substituting the very last "\" with an "@". It determines the last one by using
(len(string)-len(substitute(string, substring, "")))\len(substring)
In this scenario, the substring is simply "\" which has a length of 1, so you could leave off the division at the end and just use:
=FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","@",LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",""))))
Now we can use that to get the folder path:
=LEFT(A1,FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","@",LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","")))))
Here's the folder path without the trailing \
=LEFT(A1,FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","@",LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",""))))-1)
And to get just the filename:
=MID(A1,FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\","@",LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",""))))+1,99)
However, here is an alternate version of getting everything to the right of the last instance of a specific character. So using our same example, this would also return the file name:
=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",REPT(" ",99)),99))