Function Removes Commas from Multi-Select Fields

Hi @William_Nutt. I am trying to turn a multi-select field into simple text. I am running into the problem that if the multi-select option choice has a comma in it, the text output returns within quotation marks. I need to avoid the quotation marks. Any chance you might have run into this problem and found a solution?.

You can use SUBSTITUTE.

Thank you @Elias_Gomez_Sainz. Unsure on how to use SUBSTITUTE but will do some research. Seems like I am having a dumb problem. Don’t know why the comma is making the text be in quotation marks.

Maybe this example will clarify why Airtable puts quotes around items with commas:

I could use SUBSTITUTE to remove them, as @Elias_Gomez_Sainz suggested:

SUBSTITUTE({Color combos}, '"', '')

But then it looks like I’ve got three items, not two:

For a moment I thought that it might be possible to force a different separator between each item before removing the quotes, so you could have something like this:

Red, green | Blue

I assumed that the items were stored in an array, and that ARRAYJOIN would allow changing of the separator. However, it has no affect whatsoever.

ARRAYJOIN({Color combos}, " | ")

Because I didn’t need to concatenate {Color combos} with a string when doing the earlier SUBSTITUTE test, it appears that Airtable automatically converts the array (if it even is an array) to a string before any formula gets hold of it.

What ultimately did the job was nested series of SUBSTITUTE functions:

SUBSTITUTE(
    SUBSTITUTE(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            {Color combos},
            '", ',
            ' | '
        ),
        ', "',
        ' | '
    ),
    '"',
    ''
)

Maybe this example will clarify why Airtable puts quotes around items with commas:

I could use SUBSTITUTE to remove them, as @Elias_Gomez_Sainz suggested:

SUBSTITUTE({Color combos}, '"', '')

But then it looks like I’ve got three items, not two:

For a moment I thought that it might be possible to force a different separator between each item before removing the quotes, so you could have something like this:

Red, green | Blue

I assumed that the items were stored in an array, and that ARRAYJOIN would allow changing of the separator. However, it has no affect whatsoever.

ARRAYJOIN({Color combos}, " | ")

Because I didn’t need to concatenate {Color combos} with a string when doing the earlier SUBSTITUTE test, it appears that Airtable automatically converts the array (if it even is an array) to a string before any formula gets hold of it.

What ultimately did the job was nested series of SUBSTITUTE functions:

SUBSTITUTE(
    SUBSTITUTE(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            {Color combos},
            '", ',
            ' | '
        ),
        ', "',
        ' | '
    ),
    '"',
    ''
)

Maybe this example will clarify why Airtable puts quotes around items with commas:

I could use SUBSTITUTE to remove them, as @Elias_Gomez_Sainz suggested:

SUBSTITUTE({Color combos}, '"', '')

But then it looks like I’ve got three items, not two:

For a moment I thought that it might be possible to force a different separator between each item before removing the quotes, so you could have something like this:

Red, green | Blue

I assumed that the items were stored in an array, and that ARRAYJOIN would allow changing of the separator. However, it has no affect whatsoever.

ARRAYJOIN({Color combos}, " | ")

Because I didn’t need to concatenate {Color combos} with a string when doing the earlier SUBSTITUTE test, it appears that Airtable automatically converts the array (if it even is an array) to a string before any formula gets hold of it.

What ultimately did the job was nested series of SUBSTITUTE functions:

SUBSTITUTE(
    SUBSTITUTE(
        SUBSTITUTE(
            {Color combos},
            '", ',
            ' | '
        ),
        ', "',
        ' | '
    ),
    '"',
    ''
)

:thinking: so… SUBSTITUTE.