Anything involving text parsing can be fun challenges, especially in the context of Airtable where you have so few tools to parse with. But more important (to me) concerning your challenge is what are the tasks beyond this.

If this is the first task and there are more, I would want to understand where your project is heading before nominating any particular approach for the first task because you may find that a simple external integration approach is far better than trying to muscle through each of the tasks using Cambrian-era string functions.

It appears from your example that we’re dealing with tags and tagging requirements. Perhaps even tag interpretation. There are very powerful ways to create, manage, and search content with tags. (example) If my assessment is correct, it would make sense to understand (at a basic level) the entire spectrum of your processes and text content before spending any money for any single approach. Just sayin…

Hi @airtableManuel

Whilst I don’t disagree with Bill about the solution being dependent on your actual use-case, there is a way to do this using Integromat (which would need to be triggered of course) - you could then use a Formula like the following in an Update a Record module:

Here, the split function turns the string into an array and then the slice option takes the first five entries.

Hope this helps!

Indeed. It validates one of my points - Airtable formulas are not likely the best choice when it comes to text complex parsing. Integromat is a logical choice given this challenge - it supports Split() - arguably the most important feature missing in Airtable. :winking_face:

As to the second point…

Imagine, though, that @airtableManuel’s comprehensive requirements will need 20 such processes spanning multiple tables and a sizeable volume of content. The cost with Integromat might actually be greater than Airtable itself.

It’s extremely likely that Manuel can use Integromat’s free or $9/month service for a long time, but it’s probably wise to look ahead a little and understand the scope before landing on any implementation strategy.

A third point is probably worth contemplating as well… content analytics is rapidly becoming a key business driver for many companies. From the very pixilated glimpse we have of Manual’s efirst] tag parsing challenge, one must ask (if not us, then certainly Manuel) -

What do the next five requirements look like and can all of these processes be entirely eliminated at an architectural level and/or near-free AI and machine learning?

Hi,

I can help. Please check PM.

Thanks,

Jennifer J