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Google Sheets is an incredibly powerful tool for data analysis and manipulation. One of the most useful features of Google Sheets is its ability to extract text between two characters. This means that you can easily use it to quickly find and extract specific information from a large dataset. This can be especially useful when dealing with web scraped data, as it can help to quickly filter out irrelevant information. Additionally, this feature can be used to quickly format and organize data for further analysis. All in all, the ability to extract text between two characters is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to quickly organize and analyze data in Google Sheets.
You can use the REGEXTRACT function in Google Sheets to extract all text between two specific characters in a cell.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A2,"this(.*)that")
This particular formula extracts all of the text between the characters “this” and “that” in cell A2.
The following examples show several common ways to extract text between two characters in practice.
Example 1: Extract Text Between Strings
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to extract the text in cell A2 between the strings “ran” and “miles”:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A2,"ran(.*)miles")
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B contains the text between the strings “ran” and “miles” for each corresponding cell in column A.
Example 2: Extract Text Between Parentheses
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to extract the text in cell A2 between the parentheses:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A2,"((.*))")
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B contains the text between the parentheses for each corresponding cell in column A.
Example 3: Extract Text Between Asterisks
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to extract the text in cell A2 between the asterisks:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A2,"*(.*)*")
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B contains the text between the asterisks for each corresponding cell in column A.
Note: We had to use a slash as an escape character before the asterisks so that the REGEXTRACT function recognized these characters as asterisks.
Google Sheets: How to Extract Text After a Character
Google Sheets: How to Extract Text Before a Character