Excel: Extracting a full number from a cell - bringing it all together :)

Question

First off, thank you to all how have helped get me to this point. I'm so close! On to the scenario, which I apologize in advance is a bit of a work in progress.

I have text in a cell and I need to extract a number. The tricky part is there are various situations to address.

1. The number may immediately follow a "#" and could vary in length.
   People on Stack Overflow helped me with coming up with this which works great:

    MID(B2,(FIND("#",B2,1)+1),FIND(" ",B2,FIND("#",B2,1)+1)-FIND("#",B2,1)) 

2. That was a huge leap forward, but there are also situations where there is no # sign and the cell might have "abc (1205) 645 chan", where I need to extract the 645.

I'm using this, below, in conjunction with an on error statement for when there is no "#"

TRIM(MID(B53,(FIND(" " &{"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"},B53,1)),FIND(" ",B53,FIND({"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"},B53,1))-FIND({"1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"},B53)))

So I use the first Mid/Find to avoid the (1205) and find the next " x" where x is a number. The problem is it seems I have trouble when the number I'm searching for has 1 or 3+ numbers in it, but if it has 2 I return the value just fine.

It seems I'm very close but just not there yet.

Answer 1

This formula will return the number that follows either a # or a ) in your string. If that pattern does not exist, it will return a #NUM!` error

=AGGREGATE(14,6,--MID(A1,MIN(FIND({"#",")"},A1&"#)"))+1,{1,2,3,4,5}),1)

Note the array constant as the num_chars argument of the MID function. The maximum number should be at least the largest number of digits (or decimal + digits) plus any spaces between the delimiter and the first digit, that might be expected to be found.

EDIT : If your version of Excel is prior to 2010, and does not have the AGGREGATE function, you may use this array-entered formula instead, so long as the values to be returned will be positive numbers:

=MAX(IFERROR(--MID(A1,MIN(FIND({"#",")"},A1&"#)"))+1,{1,2,3,4,5}),0))

This formula must be entered by holding down ctrl + shift while hitting enter