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Does anyone know a way to separate items from a concatenated string?

I have a table that I’ve used to make a schedule of events for a conference. Each presenter makes multiple appearances. Using Zapier and WebMerge I plan to produce a print-ready manifest for each presenter that will show their personalized schedule, along with hotel, flight, and contact information from other tables.

Problem is, when I look up the start time of their presentations I get ALL the start times in a concatenated string like this:

1/13/2017 10:35am, 1/14/2017 9:40am, 1/14/2017 12:20pm

I’d like a formula that basically says “find and display first item from string”, “find and display second item from string” etc… Then I could create fields for “Start Time 1,” “Start Time 2”, match them up with corresponding End Time fields, and get it over to WebMerge and in print.

Many many thanks to anyone who can help point me in the right direction here. :eyeglasses:

Thank you, @kuovonne for your solution.
Do you think it may be extrapolated for undefined number of Items (max 10) and with the need to put each of them separately from the new line (after " \n ") in a long text field?


The formulas should work for far more than 10 items. Just keep following the pattern. I haven’t tried it for items with "\n ", but you could try it and let us know how it goes.

With the release of the new scripting block, I think that long workarounds like this will no longer be needed.

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