Substrings and searching

[trumpimar]

Support guidelines

• I've read the support guidelines
• My request is not listed as a very good idea, but unfortunately...
• I've used the search and this has not been requested before.

Description

Similar to your example in the docs about substrings I would like to remove extraneous text from my imported account names. However, my search criterium is not at either end, but in the middle. Because of that I cannot calculate the character where I want the string to be cut off.

Solution

To work around this I would like to find the position of the criterium substring to add in the expression, similarly to the SEARCH function in MS Excel.

Additional context

No response

[JC5]

Hey, thanks for opening an issue.

I'm not entirely sure what that means. Do you have an example?

Cheers,
James

[trumpimar]

Hi James,

Sure, no problem.
Transactions going through a third party payment provider (tppp) always show the receiving account name as "name via tppp". Some examples:

There are a whole bunch of tppps, so to make a rule for every one and update whenever a new one comes along isn't really going to work. I'd like to only retain the "name" part, but to do that using expressions I'll need to find the position of the " via " substring in the complete string.

[JC5]

Ah yes, I see what you mean. This is already possible, but it may not be explained right in the docs. Here are two examples.

Given destination account "Somebody via something"

This rule ends up with "something":

This rule ends up with "Somebody":

[trumpimar]

Ah, excellent. That is exactly what I was looking for. Works like a charm.
I see you've also added this example to the docs already. Thanks for that. Are there perhaps any other specific expressions that can be used or do all PHP functions work in these fields?

[JC5]

I checked the code, this is it right now. If you need a specific function, just let me know. Regex is off the table though, just so you know :)

[beatbesmer]

Yuhe, perfect. That made things a lot easier for me. Once again, a thousand thanks from me too.
But for the constant complainers here ;-) what if I want to remove several strings from the notes at once ?
Why: I extract the BTC (three strings of 4 characters) from CAMT to the notes, which are needed to determine the type of transaction -> they are added as keywords via a rule, after which I no longer need the strings. Currently, I have three rule actions that are executed and edit the notes three times to remove them. It works with three log entries. But my inner Adrian Monk only wants one entry :)

[JC5]

In theory you could nest it three times, right? Haven't tried it tho.