Dennis,
Thank you once again.
I want only the file name portion of that string. Let's take a hypothetical
case in which I am processing data for a company (Itty Bitty Marketers) which
has a payroll department which organizes information into salaried or hourly
and for hourly it has virtual pay stubs and time sheets with the time sheets
organized by month. There is a separate file for each employee (e.g. Fred
Jones) and there are five sheets named Week 1 through Week 5. It is desired to
display the employee name as taken from the file name. The cell("filename")
function returns something like this:
'file:///home/jelang/My%20Customers/Itty%20Bitty%20Marketers/Payroll%20Departmen
t/Hourly/Time%20Sheets/January%202005/Fred%20Jones.ods'#Week 3
In this case what I want to extract and display are the ten characters "Fred
Jones" so I need to locate and remove everything through some eleven slashes as
well as everything from the dot to the end of the string. Similar files for
other companies for which I process data may have their files organized in
directory trees of differing complexity. I want the file name extraction to
work seamlessly. The constants are that I want to display everything between
the final slash and the first dot. If only I could search right to left for the
final slash it would be easy but that does not appear to be a feature of OOo's
Find() function. I attempted to specify a negative number for start position on
the chance that OOo would use that as a cue to perform a right to left rather
than left to right scan but it did not work. As long as there are not more than
32 slashes (an awful thought) defining the directory structure my
implementation, though ugly, will do the trick. Actually my method removes the
part through the first three slashes in one operation along with the trailing
sheet name portion.
As you can probably deduce from the string above, I am running OOo on a Linux
platform.
--
Jim
Dennis Marks wrote at 17:17 on 8 May 2006:
> Since there is only a single dot (.) in the name doesn't my method work no
> matter how many levels of directories. It will return the final 8 characters
> prior to the dot. It doesn't matter how many directories (slashes). Now it's
> only a matter of removing any slashes for shorter names. It would probably
> be no more than one slash which can be found using FIND. With this position
> you can keep only the RIGHT portion. This has not been fully tested and
> maybe your naming convention will not work using it.
>
> --
> Dennis
>
> Disclaimer: The above is my opinion. I do not guarantee it. ...
>
> "James E. Lang" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Thank you Dennis for your very prompt response. Since it appears that it
> > is
> > impossible to perform a "find" from the right end of the string back
> > toward the
> > left end I have had to take your advice to "Maybe do the second parse in
> > another cell" but since the path name that I am attempting to strip
> > contains a
> > number of directory names I have had to do this multiple times. In my
> > case, I
> > am using this information in a merged cell (B39:AK39) which hides 35 other
> > cells so I have placed this formula in cell C39:
> > SUBSTITUTE(CELL("filename");"%20";" ")
> > It takes the returned value of cell("filename") and changes all the %20
> > values
> > to spaces and stores the result in cell C39. Then I have placed this
> > formula in
> > cell D39:
> > MID(C39;10;FIND("'";C39;2)-10)
> > It strips the leading single quote and "file:///" from the start of the
> > string
> > and the trailing single quote plus the sheet name from the end of it and
> > stores
> > the result in D39. Then I have placed this formula in cell E39 and filled
> > it
> > right through cell AJ39:
> > IF(FIND("/";D39&"/")<LEN(D39);RIGHT(D39;LEN(D39)-FIND("/";D39));D39)
> > Each of these copies removes everything through the first slash starting
> > at the
> > left end of the string that it finds in the prior cell. By filling the
> > cells
> > right with this formula I am able to strip up to 32 slashes which ought to
> > be
> > more than sufficient. I use the following formula in cell AK39 to finish
> > the
> > parsing:
> > IF(FIND(".";AJ39&".")<LEN(AJ39);LEFT(AJ39;FIND(".";AJ39)-1);AJ39)
> > This strips all file extensions that may exist. Finally I reference cell
> > AK39
> > in my displayed text with another formula like this:
> > "verbiage "&AK39&" more verbiage"
> >
> > Cells C39 through AK39 are all hidden behind the merged cell so it looks
> > cleaner than it appears in this description. Though not clean, this does
> > work.
> > I do wish that there were a cleaner way to do this.
> >
> > --
> > Jim
> >
> > Dennis Marks wrote at 7:57 on 6 May 2006:
> >
> >> The following will work if the filenames are a fixed length. I am
> >> assuming 8
> >> characters.
> >> =MID(CELL("filename");FIND(".";CELL("filename"))-8;8)
> >>
> >> If the length is variable then you could include another find() for the
> >> slash and a right() to remove it and preceding characters but this will
> >> make
> >> it much more complicated. Maybe do the second parse in another cell.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dennis
> >>
> >> Disclaimer: The above is my opinion. I do not guarantee it. ...
> >>
> >> "James E. Lang" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> >> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >> > I want to display the filename within a CALC document. I do not want to
> >> > include the path or the filename extension.
> >> >
> >> > I have only been able to find one way to obtain the name of the CALC
> >> > document file using standard functions. That is 'cell("filename")' but
> >> > that
> >> > gives me a whole lot of extra text that I don't need or want.
> >> >
> >> > Is there a cleaner way? If not, then how can I parse the text generated
> >> > by
> >> > this function to strip the path and everything starting with the
> >> > filename
> >> > extension? I see no way to search a text string from right to left for
> >> > a
> >> > sub-string. I find it hard to believe that this is an extremely rare
> >> > requirement.
> >> >
> >> > I do not want to write a function in Basic to accomplish this task
> >> > since I
> >> > would like this to be compatible with Excel.
> >> >
> >> > I am using OOo version 2.0 (Build 2.0.0.1). I downloaded version 2.0.2
> >> > yesterday and will be upgrading to it extremely soon.
> >> >
> >> > --
> >> > Jim
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