Excel删除特定字符后，同时忽略该字符的前4个实例

Question

I have a table that is formatted like so:

New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS

where -> is sub category.

i want to limit the entire table to 5 sub-directories.. thus count 5-> then remove everything after that.

ideas?

Answer 1

I guess best is to do a small user defined function in VBA to look for the nth occurence of the seperator string and keeps all that is left of that; example

Function CutAt(Arg As String, Sep As String, Level As Integer)
Dim Idx As Integer, ArgLen As Integer, SepLen As Integer, FCnt As Integer

    ArgLen = Len(Arg)                  ' argument length
    SepLen = Len(Sep)                  ' seperator length
                                       ' no check that arglen > seplen !!!
    Idx = 1                            ' position mark
    FCnt = 0                           ' find counter

    For Idx = 1 To ArgLen - SepLen + 1
        If Mid(Arg, Idx, SepLen) = Sep Then FCnt = FCnt + 1
        If FCnt = Level Then Exit For
    Next Idx

    If FCnt = Level Then
        CutAt = Left(Arg, Idx - 1)
    Else
        CutAt = Arg
    End If

End Function

Use this as a rather unprotected and unsafe peace of code just to demonstrate the principles - it's maybe not "enduser safe" in each & every way. I tested with

A1: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS -> more -> even more -> much more
A2: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS -> more -> even more
A3: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS -> more
A4: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS
A5: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal
A6: New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial

with formula =cutat(A1,"->",5) (copied down 6 times) I get

New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS 
New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS 
New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS 
New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal -> ATTORNEYS
New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial -> Legal
New York -> ALBANY -> Legal & Financial

you may need to add a trim function here & there if you want to remove leading/trailing blanks.

Hope that helps

good luck

Answer 2

MikeD's VBA solution is a very nice one.

For the record, here is a formula solution (thanks to this thread )

Put this formula to find the n-th occurence of a string in a new column:

=IF(LEN(B1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1,E1,""))>=F1*LEN(E1), SEARCH("@",SUBSTITUTE(B1,E1,"@",F1)),"Not Found")

where B1 houses a target string, E1 the character you are looking for ("->" in your case) and F1 the n-th occurrence (5 in your case).

Afterwards, put this formula in another column:

=IF(B6<>"Not Found",MID(B1,1,B6-LEN(E1)),B6)

where B6 is the result of the previous formula.