Excel question: Does substring exist

[obfusciatrist]

I need a formula to use in Excel that will simply return TRUE if a certain subset exists within the text of a cell.

Say for example that cell A1 reads “BLAH BLAH BLAH” and I wanted to find out whether the string “AH BL” exists in that cell.

Is there a way to do that? FIND and SEARCH tell you where the string starts, but it assumes the substring has to be in the referenced cell and returns an error if it isn’t present. So, I either I need a formula to directly test it or some way of usefully using the error.

Anybody know of anything?

[CookingWithGas]

Yes. See Excel Help for the FIND function. The within_text can be a cell reference.

FIND(find_text,within_text,start_num)

FINDB(find_text,within_text,start_num)

Find_text is the text you want to find.

If find_text is “” (empty text), FIND matches the first character in the search string (that is, the character numbered start_num or 1).
Find_text cannot contain any wildcard characters.
Within_text is the text containing the text you want to find.

Start_num specifies the character at which to start the search. The first character in within_text is character number 1. If you omit start_num, it is assumed to be 1.

Tip Use start_num to skip a specified number of characters. For example, suppose you are working with the text string “AYF0093.YoungMensApparel”. To find the number of the first “Y” in the descriptive part of the text string, set start_num equal to 8 so that the serial-number portion of the text is not searched. FIND begins with character 8, finds find_text at the next character, and returns the number 9. FIND always returns the number of characters from the start of within_text, counting the characters you skip if start_num is greater than 1.

Remarks

If find_text does not appear in within_text, FIND and FINDB return the #VALUE! error value.
If start_num is not greater than zero, FIND and FINDB return the #VALUE! error value.
If start_num is greater than the length of within_text, FIND and FINDB return the #VALUE! error value.

Examples

FIND(“M”,“Miriam McGovern”) equals 1

FIND(“m”,“Miriam McGovern”) equals 6

FIND(“M”,“Miriam McGovern”,3) equals 8

[CookingWithGas]

Sorry, I didn’t read carefully enough. You want to say,

=if(iserr(find(“looking for this”,“within this”)),FALSE,TRUE)

[obfusciatrist]

iserr is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks CookingWithGas!

I thought I had looked through that section of the functions but I guess I missed it. I was getting pretty frustrated and we all know that induces blindness.

Much appreciated.

[x1134x]

@CookingWithGas

Sorry, I didn’t read carefully enough. You want to say,

=if(iserr(find(“looking for this”,“within this”)),FALSE,TRUE)

get rid of the quotes for the “within this” if you want to reference a cell

=if(iserr(find(“looking for this”,within this)),FALSE,TRUE)
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