topic Re: Left Function in Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Left Function

Lynnise — Thu, 24 May 2018 01:37:20 GMT

Is there a fucntion or formula that I can use that will mimic the the LEFT function in Excel? I am trying to pull the first 5 charactors from a string ?

Thank you in advance!

Re: Left Function

MarqueeCrew — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:42:16 GMT

LEFT([STRING],5)

Re: Left Function

Lynnise — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:47:15 GMT

Thank you so much and "DUH" to myself! I did have brackets intially.

Re: Left Function

Suzanne — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 01:23:14 GMT

Mark, what if you had this:

"Trying to find the first position of o"

In excel, you can search the string and get back that the first "o" is at position 9 (might be 8. I don't remember if search is 0 based).

I have a situation in Alteryx where I'm trying to find a character "|". I'd like to do something like --> right([fieldname],length([FieldName])-search([fieldname],'|'))

Re: Left Function

cmcclellan — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 02:24:25 GMT

Use FINDSTRING the same way as you would in Excel :)

Re: Left Function

Suzanne — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:10:31 GMT

Hi cmcclellan. FINDSTRING brought back True/FAlse, not the position of the character in the string. Unless I'm not using it correctly ... a real possibility -:)

Re: Left Function

MarqueeCrew — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:27:24 GMT

@Suzanne,

I'm sorry but I'd have to go to a library (inside of a museum) to dust off a book on Excel to answer your question. I'll answer it in the 21st century with a regular expression. I still don't know what your objective is and why you wouldn't use a text to columns to parse on the | symbol. But before I go there, here is a cut & paste from the help on FindString():

FindString(String,Target): Searches for the occurrence of a particular string (Target) within another string (String) and returns the numeric position of its occurrence in the string.

Returns the 0 based index of the first occurrence of Target in String. Returns -1 if no occurrence.

Re: Left Function

cmcclellan — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 23:01:21 GMT

Not true/false, you just have to understand what the results are saying ( @MarqueeCrew already explained), but this might help more :

It's a zero-based calculation, so you might need to add 1 to the result depending on what you want to do ...

0 = John found at the start

1 = John found. First character is counted as 0, second character is 1

7 = John found, calculation as per above

-1 = John not found at all

FINDSTRING IS case-sensitive = JOHN, John and john will give 3 different results

Re: Left Function

kishore_pvkk — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 11:59:36 GMT

I am using the below function but I am getting error

Left([GL Account Number], 1)

Re: Left Function

kishore_pvkk — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:01:08 GMT

Below is the error