Finding a text string from within a text & numbers string

mrfahaji

New Member
Joined
Oct 25, 2012
Messages
34
Hi, I have searched for something like this as I'm sure I won't be the first to ask but I am only able to find examples of formulae that don't work in my situation!

I want to extract a name from within a text string, the string will look something like this:

5Jones
9Smith
15Johnson
22Williams

And I just want the names, i.e. "Jones", "Smith" etc. Because the numbers at the start of the string are different lengths I need a function which finds the first 'letter' character.

In an ideal world I'd also like the function to still pull out the name if the string looks like this:

5JonesEngland 45
9SmithCanada 67
15JohnsonUSA 73
22WilliamsCanada 80

Though I imagine that may be difficult - if those countries were the only three possible, can you integrate a FIND function with a Namelist? If not then I can probably split over a couple of columns and do multiple IF statements.

Apologies for splitting my question into two - I'd be happy if someone can help me with the basic one, and ecstatic if someone can solve the trickier one!
 

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