Text parsing in FileMaker: Left, Right, Middle, and Position

Intermediate

FileMaker's text parsing functions let you extract any substring from a text value by position or by searching for a delimiter. Learn Left(), Right(), Middle(), and Position() for real-world parsing tasks.

What you'll learn

How Left(), Right(), and Middle() extract substrings by position
How Position() finds the character position of a substring
How to combine them to extract dynamically positioned substrings

Left(), Right(), and Middle() extract substrings by character position, while Position() locates a substring within text — combine them to parse structured strings like codes, filenames, or delimited data.

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Extract fixed-width substrings

Left() extracts characters from the start, Right() from the end, Middle() from any position. All take the text and a character count.

FileMaker Script

# Order code format: "ORD-2024-001234"
Set Variable [ $code ; Value: Orders::code ]

Left   ( $code ; 3 )           // "ORD"
Right  ( $code ; 6 )           // "001234"
Middle ( $code ; 5 ; 4 )       // "2024" (start at char 5, length 4)

Substitute() for text replacement in FileMaker PatternCount(): searching and counting occurrences in FileMaker