How can I use regexextract function in Google Docs spreadsheets to get “all” occurrences of a string?

Question

My text string is in cell D2:

Decision, ERC Case No. 2009-094 MC, In the Matter of the Application for Authority to Secure Loan from the National Electrification         


        

Answer 1

You can use capture groups, which will cause regexextract() to return an array. You can use this as the cell result, in which case you will get a range of results, or you can feed the array to another function to reformat it to your purpose. For example:

regexextract( "abracadabra" ; "(bra).*(bra)" )

will return the array:

{bra,bra}

Another approach would be to use regexreplace(). This has the advantage that the replace is global (like s/pattern/replacement/g), so you do not need to know the number of results in advance. For example:

regexreplace( "aBRAcadaBRA" ; "[a-z]+" ; "..." )

will return the string:

...BRA...BRA

Answer 2

Here are two solutions, one using the specific terms in the author's example, the other one expanding on the author's sample regex pattern which appears to match all ALLCAPS terms. I'm not sure which is wanted, so I gave both.

(Put the block of text in A1)

Generic solution for all words in ALLCAPS

=regexreplace(regexreplace(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"\b\w[^A-Z]*\b","|"),"\W+","|"),"^\||\|$","")

Result:

ERC|MC|NEA|DIELCO

NB: The brunt of the work is in the CAPITALIZED formula, the lowercase functions are just for cleanup.

If you want space separation, the formula is a little simpler:

=trim(regexreplace(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"\b\w[^A-Z]*\b"," "),"\W+"," "))

Result:

ERC MC NEA DIELCO

(One way I like playing with regex in google spreadsheets is to read the regex pattern from another cell so I can change it without having to edit or re-paste into all the cells using that pattern. This looks so:

Cell A1:

Block of text

Cell B1 (no quote marks):

\b\w[^A-Z]*\b

Formula, in any cell:

=trim(regexreplace(REGEXREPLACE(A1,B$1," "),"\W+"," "))

By anchoring it to B$1, I can fill all my rows at once and the reference won't increment.)

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Previous answer:

Specific solution for selected terms (ERC, DIELCO)

=regexreplace(join("|",IF(REGEXMATCH(A1,"ERC"),"ERC",""),IF(REGEXMATCH(A1,"DIELCO"),"DIELCO","")),"(^\||\|$)","")

Result:

ERC|DIELCO

As before, the brunt of the work is in the CAPITALIZED formula, the lowercase functions are just for cleanup.

This formula will find any ERC or DIELCO, or both in the block of text. The initial order doesn't matter, but the output will always be ERC followed by DIELCO (the order of appearance is lost). This fixes the shortcoming with the previous answer using "(bra).*(bra)" in that isolated ERC or DIELCO can still be matched.

This also has a simpler form with space separation:

=trim(join(" ",IF(REGEXMATCH(A1,"ERC"),"ERC",""),IF(REGEXMATCH(A1,"DIELCO"),"DIELCO","")))

Result:

ERC DIELCO