https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68844
Priority: medium
Bug ID: 68844
Assignee: [email protected]
Summary: Other: [Feature Request] =word(cellref,n,[delimiter])
function to extract the nth word
Severity: normal
Classification: Unclassified
OS: All
Reporter: [email protected]
Hardware: Other
Whiteboard: BSA
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Version: 4.1.0.4 release
Component: Spreadsheet
Product: LibreOffice
Problem description:
Originally asked on
http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/22070/feature-request-wordcellrefn-function/
Quite often I need to quickly extract certain words from lines of text.
Text-to-columns is overkill for this because I usually have to delete all the
columns that I'm not interested in.
What I'd like to see is a function called "word" which extracts the nth word
from the text in a cell, which can be used like this:
A B C
the cat sat on the mat =word(A1,2) =word(A1,6)
The result is:
the cat sat on the mat cat mat
This is so much easier than hacking about with =mid(A1,1,find(" ",A1)) ...and
similar acrobatics. A "word" is space-delimited text by default, and
leading/trailing/multiple spaces should be insignificant. That is, when you ask
for word 1, you should get the first space-delimited word and no surrounding
spaces.
The full function could allow a delimiter to be specified, for example
=word(cellref,pos[,delimiter]) in which you could specify one or more
delimiters. The delimiter, if omitted, should default to a space.
Invalid word position numbers should simply cause the function to return empty
text ("").
A negative word position number should return the nth last word in the string.
For example, word("the cat",-1) should return "cat".
Specifying zero as the word position should return empty text ("").
The function should never return an error. The result is not used for
calculation, so an error indication is unnecessary. Empty text is an acceptable
return value when an error occurs.
The function should be called "word". A precedent for this is the almost
identical function built-in to the Rexx Programming Language - see
http://www.rexxinfo.org/html/functions.html#word.
Steps to reproduce:
None. This is a feature request.
Current behavior:
Limited string manipulation functions which are less easy and more
time-consuming to use in the real world.
Expected behavior:
Intuitive easy-to-use built-in text manipulation functions which actually use
the power of computers rather than requiring an end-user to be a programmer. A
programmer could easily implement this as a
a user-defined function, but the vast majority of users are not programmers and
they would benefit from simple built-in functions such as this one. I'm not
asking for a regular expression parser. The simple functions should be
built-in.
Operating System: All
Version: 4.1.0.4 release
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