Split Text By every Nth Delimiter and Transpose Google Sheets

Question

I need to extract text from a block of text. The block looks like this:

{"some text"},{"some more text"},{"some other"},{"some other text"},{"let's add more"},{"even more other text"}

The text is supposed to be in pairs so that the first and second {""},{""} go into the same cell and so forth. I tried the split function but since the delimiter is a comma I am not able to split in pairs. So I need to split after every 2 commas and put the resulting pair in it's own cell. Then Transpose the result so that the text goes inside a column vertically.

I tried =SPLIT("",",") but didn't get the desired output.

I am using Google sheets for this and would like to do this inside Google Sheets, but I'm open to doing this inside Excel.

If you want to have a look at the Google Sheets File, here is the link https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sbK6nF-6SO4oOKTdercgnfHGeQol-vfV5SRcFXNBy5o/edit?usp=sharing

Answer 1

Interesting and fun query.

In B2 , see if the following formula works for you:

=TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2,"([^,]+,[^,]+),","$1|"),"|"))

The regular expression can be made more specific to target only those comma's in between curly brackets if need be.

---

Edit

To SPLIT your desired outcome into two columns and get rid of the curly brackets and outer quotes I came up with:

=TRANSPOSE({SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2,"{""([^,]+)""},{""([^,]+)""}(?:,|$)","$1|"),"|");SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2,"{""([^,]+)""},{""([^,]+)""}(?:,|$)","$2|"),"|")})

Answer 2

To adapt the solution for ARRAYFORMULA we just need to join all the strings with comma.

A few notes on the following solution:

With REGEXREPLACE we strip all the surrounding {"..."} . At the same time we replace every even comma (not just every comma, but the ones between records, eg commas inside the strings won't be affected) with "♠" for later splitting pairs into the separate strings, and every odd comma we replace with "♥" for later splitting a pair into two strings.

=ARRAYFORMULA(
  SPLIT(
    TRANSPOSE(
      SPLIT(
        REGEXREPLACE(
          TEXTJOIN(
            ",",
            True,
            A2:A
          ),
          "\{""(.*?)""\},\{""(.*?)""\},?",
          "$1♥$2♠"
        ),
        "♠"
      )
    ),
    "♥"
  )
)