Contains vs. FindString

Is there a benefit to using FindString != -1 vs. Contains as an if, then qualifier? I know the benefit of using contains is that it gives the case insensitive option which you can't do with findstring without uppercase([field]) or lowercase([field]), but is there a downside to using this over findstring?

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Accepted answers

NicoleJohnson

FindString will actually tell you the position of the field you're looking for, whereas Contains just tells you whether or not it finds the string as a True/False answer.

So if you only need to know whether or not a string contains something else (i.e. "Green Apples" contains the word "Apple" but "Bartlett Pears" does not), then I would use Contains, especially because it has the option of making it case sensitive...

But if you need to know at which character "Apple" starts so that you can parse out anything in front of it, then you might want to use FindString.

Contains("Green Apples","Apples") = -1 (<-- Which in this case means True)
FindString("Green Apples","Apples") = 6

Hope that helps!

NJ

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MarqueeCrew

👍 question!

If the context of the string is important, the findstring function let's you know where it was found. It can be very helpful if you are going to perform other string functions.

The regex_match function will give you super powers. Using it, you can be case sensitive or insensitive and add patterns as well counts of matches (regex_countmatches) to see if it contains many targets.

I hope that this helps you.

Cheers,

Mark

NicoleJohnson

Mancunian

I have a coloumn with all months and years since 2011, but I just need to extract the years 2016 and 2017. How can I specify these 2 years in a single FindString Formula.

The data is april, 2016, May, 2013, January 2017

I have been trying this but to no avail.

FindString([DateTime_Out],"2016"&"2017")>-1

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