How to return the string between 5th and 6th Spaces in a String

Question

What I have?

A column of strings [Description] that look like this:

Target Host: dcmxxxxxxc032.erc.nam.fm.com Target Name: dxxxxxxgsc047.erc.nam.fm.com Filesystem /u01 has 4.98% available space - fallen below warning (20) or critical (5) threshold.

Sample substring to be returned is (dxxxxxxgsc047.erc.nam.fm.com)

The only consistency in this data is that the desired string occurs between the 5th and 6th occurrences of spaces " " in the string, and after the phrase "Target Name: " The length of the substring varies, but it always ends in another " ", hence my attempt to grab the substring between the 5th and 6th spaces.

What I did?

MID([Description],((FIND([Description],"Target Name: "))+13),FIND([Description]," ",((FIND([Description],"Target Name"))+14)))

But that does not work.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

In Tableau 9 you can use regular expressions in formulas, it makes the task simpler:

REGEXP_EXTRACT([Description], "Target Name: (.*?) ")

Alternatively in Tableau 9 you can use the new FINDNTH function:

MID(
     [Description],
     FINDNTH([Description]," ", 5) + 1, 
     FINDNTH([Description]," ", 6) - FINDNTH([Description]," ", 5) - 1
   )

Prior to Tableau 9 you'd have to use string manipulation methods similar to what you've tried, just need to be very careful with arithmetic and providing the right arguments (the third argument in MIDis length, not index of the end character, so we need to subtract the index of the start character):

MID(
   [Description]
   , FIND([Description], "Target Name:") + 13
   , FIND([Description], " ", FIND([Description], "Target Name:") + 15)
     - (FIND([Description], "Target Name:") + 13)
)