Parsing data of a string separated by ","

[Benoit_Lorent]

Hi, I will need to separate the data from a “lookup” column nammed “Response (from SMS Responses)” which gives me the list of poll results as numbers (between 1 and 5 or a comment) :

I tried formulas like this:
LEFT({Response (from SMS Responses)}, 1)

Or this one:
LEFT({Response (from SMS Responses)}, FIND(",", {Response (from SMS Responses)}) -1)

But I always come across errors, what could I do?

Thanks in advance !

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Benoit_Lorent:

from a “lookup” column

This is the source of the issue. The lookup appears to be a comma separated text string, but it is not. It is an array.

One method of dealing with this is to force the lookup to be a text string in your formula:

LEFT({Response (from SMS Responses)} & "", 1)

On the other hand, this will not work well because there is no actual comma in the resulting text string.

Recommend that instead of trying to parse this lookup, look into using

• a new conditional lookup/rollup field
• a rollup field