Parsing Text Does Not Have to Be Hard

I was dealing with some parsing issues over the last few days and did some research to see what was happening in blog posts and youtube.  I found the following interesting and helpful articles:

Text Parsing with FileMaker = Chivalry Software

Text Parsing in FileMaker:  LIve Demo (YouTube, Skeleton Key)

Scanning Barcodes and More with FileMaker Go (Mighty Data)

Text parsing can get complicated rather quickly, so study the fine offerings found here and elsewhere when you encounter complicated parsing situations.

And, don’t forget to look for custom functions here and here.  I found two that helped me with my last project, and both worked well:

ParseParameter  This handy little function returns the values from a Pipe (|) delimited file:  ParseParameter ( |Jane|Mary Beth|Joe| , 2 ) returns Mary Beth.

FnNameParser   This easy to use function returns name values in 15 different formats from a single text field:

Examples:

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Francisco de la Hoya: Andrew Smith-Jones:
————————————————————————————————————————-
namestraight: Martin Luther King Francisco de la Hoya Andrew Smith-Jones
first: Martin Francisco Andrew
middle: Luther
last: King de la Hoya Smith-Jones
firstlast: Martin King Francisco de la Hoya Andrew Smith-Jones
firstmlast: Martin L. King Francisco de la Hoya Andrew Smith-Jones
firstmiddlelast: Martin Luther King Francisco de la Hoya Andrew Smith-Jones
firstl: Martin K. Francisco D. Andrew S.
flast: M. King F. de la Hoya A. Smith-Jones
lastfirst: King, Martin de la Hoya, Francisco Smith-Jones, Andrew
lastfirstm: King, Martin L. de la Hoya, Francisco Smith-Jones, Andrew
initials: MK FD AS
initialslong: MLK FD AS

Pretty powerful stuff – and it worked flawlessly for me.

So, don’t give up when you hit a hurdle while parsing text.  There is plenty of help to be found on the web.