The final parameter specified the number of characters to be returned.Ĭleaning up phone numbers is a classic data migration chore, which is why I chose it for the examples here.

In the example above I use the number 5 because I want to pull out the telephone number prefix which starts with the fifth character in the string, following the three digit area code and the first hyphen. The second parameter is the position where you want FileMaker to start extracting text. The first parameter is the source text as described above. Right, as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, starts at the opposite side. For Left FileMaker starts at the first character on the left and returns the number of characters specified. The second parameter is the number of characters you want returned from the text in the first parameter. The first is some text either as a string in quotes as shown above, the name of a field that contains text, or an expression with a text result. Let’s start with Left and Right.īoth Left and Right take two parameters. All three simply extract a portion of the text you supply. Whatever the impetus, Left, Right, and Middle are the cornerstones of text manipulation in FileMaker. Text parsing pops up a lot when migrating data from an old system to a new one, or even when you realize that your data just needs some grooming.

Filemaker pro database extractor