In excel, I want to extract a string of characters up to a certain character or character string.?

Question

Example.
monday, 2 2007. I want to extract everything up to the comma.
or
trn|txd|34234|2007|adx|afod8ad
I want to extract everything up to adx.

the number of characters varies of what I want to select, so the comon left statement doesn't work.

Answer 1

For the date this seems to work
=LEFT(A2,(FIND(",",A2)-1))
and for the other string
=LEFT(A2,(FIND("adx",A2)-1))

Answer 2

Basically, you will need to find the character where you want to start, count the numbers of characters leading to it, and then use that as the starting point to extract the text to the right of it.

Answer 3

I'd use something like =left(A1,find("string to find",A1))

That finds the "string to find" in cell A1, returns the starting position of the string, then uses left to pull everything from the left most character to the found position as the result of the equation. You'll probably have to play around with adding or subtracting 1 from the find string (find("string to find",A1)+1 or find("string to find",A1)-1)