Regular Expressions, Please

[Bus_Mom]

Regular expressions are my favourite. They’re amazing for processing data of all kinds, especially in the context of data input by many people because it recognises patterns. They’re also so universal, which makes them great for AppSheet, which integrates data from outside sources. My Google Sheets are full of array formulas that use them. Extract and Match are my favourites, but Replace makes the occasional appearance as well.

For example, I’m trying to extract the time digits from a time stamp right now, because they’re added to unique string.
TIMESTAMP: 5/19/2018 00:00:00 (WANT 000000)
Easy with REGEX: =RIGHT(RegexReplace(To_Text(A1),"\D+",""),6)
With AppSheet: =SUBSTITUTE(TIME([TIMESTAMP])-“00:00:00”,":","")
(side note: I’ve seen a lot of threads asking for 24-hour time format selection regardless of locale. This would be great!! I’m calculating a duration here to get the correct numbers.)

I’ve been figuring out how to use substitute a lot, but it gets tricky when dealing with multiple characters and substrings (e.g. phone numbers, which everyone inputs differently). Setting validation rules and using lots of substituting works, but regex is just amazing for standardization!!

Please, add my vote for regular expressions!!

[jcadence]

For the pop-up messages there’s not a way to opt out of them completely at this time. For the review, are you referring to the NPS style survey that asks for a rating? If so, I’ll do a little digging to see how to remove the repetitive prompt. For really active creators such as yourself I imagine thats incredibly annoying to experience.

Finally, thanks for all your feedback today. I’ve made a few notes to take back to the team and we’ll see how we can better provide information in the future. Have a great rest of your week @Grant_Stead!

[Grant_Stead]

Absolutely! You have a great week as well!

[Fabian_Weller]

Thank you @Bus_Mom for bringing this up.
I too need Regular Expressions in AppSheet.
I’m using OCRTEXT() to extract numbers from images.

Using the provided EXTRACT() expressions is very cool, but also limited.
I need to extract Numbers that follow a pattern like:

1513.100.006
In RegEx this would be
[0-9]{4}.[0-9]{3}.[0-9]{3}

Or:
2485563.04
Would be:
[0-9]{7}.[0-9]{2}

Right now I substitute the “1513.” into “1513@”. Then I use EXTRACTEMAILS() to find the “Email” 1513@100.006. After that I use substitute “@” to “.” to get the original number “1513.100.006”.
This is working, but would be unnecessary with RegEx.

[mateo]

Any updates maybe? It would be blessing to have an opportunity to use RegEx.

[Steve]

No change.

[Roderick]

On our radar! 

[alejomgp]

Any updates on this request? It would be a huge improvement to Appsheet!