Use Contains in Filter Tool with Multiple Selection

Question

Is it able to use one Contains only to filter multiple selection?

In my attached example, you can see it works if I use 'in'. But if I applied the same logic for contains, it does not work if I only use one contains. It worked if I use 2 contains and an 'or', but for some reason I  only need one contains, is it possible?

Multiple Selection.yxmd

BS_THE_ANALYST · Answer

@zqlcancer

Anything Regex related, always just chuck the Regular Expression i.e: ".1234.*|.2334.*" into chatbotgpt and ask it to tell you what it's doing. That's always good for learning.

Anyway, "." is a wildcard, yes. It means any character.
".*" means any character 0 or more times.

".*?" means any character 0 or more times but is NOT (unlike .*) greedy!

Without getting too much into the weeds:
.*?WORD means keep going until you find "WORD". It doesn't care if word is half way through the text, at the very start, or at the very end.

If you imagine you have a sentence like this:
"heres a WORD and more words"

You'll notice I've made the first part bold as that part is currently MATCHED. In order to match then end of the sentence you need to do this:
.*?WORD.*

Basically saying, hey, keep going until you find WORD and then if there's any characters after it, match them, and if there aren't any because it's at the end of the sentence, this fine also. Reason why ... ".*" means 0, 1 or many ..

The issue with yours:

REGEX_Match([Entity],".1234.*|.2334.*")

You've just used a "." on it's own. 
This means your expecting ANY character before 1234 and something MUST be there. By doing .* you are saying there could be 0, 1, or many characters before it. Of course, this is more flexible.

Hope that helps.

As a hidden gem: https://regex101.com/r/XlDDaB/1 
On here I've corrected HALF of your regular expression. You can see some of the lines are matched, some are not. This view should allow you to build more of a conceptual understanding. Regex101 is my goto for practicing and learning regex.

All the best,

BS

zqlcancer · Answer

@BS_THE_ANALYST ， thanks. Are the special marks(* and ?) you used wild cards? But what about the dot(I refer to .)?why do we need it?

If I need filter any cells which contains 1234 and 2334 from below table, shall I right the formular as

REGEX_Match([Entity],".1234.*|.2334.*")

Entity

1234ab

2345ac

1234fg

2334fb

2345bf

binu_acs · Answer

@zqlcancer Contains takes only one argument , so you have to use OR operator with multiple contains