Mastering Coda's Formulas

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Mastering Coda's Formulas

Split
Split

A flexible way to gain more control over your data

A flexible way to gain more control over your data

Before everything - What is this formula?

Split() allows you turn information into lists, or modify how current list items are defined. Try it out below - type in any sentence into the yellow box and watch how it turns your sentence into a list of words.

Sentence

Coda is by far the coolest No-Code tool you can ever imagine

There are no rows in this table

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List of

12

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words:

CodaisbyfarthecoolestNo-Codetoolyoucaneverimagine

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List of

60

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characters:

Coda is by far the coolest No- Show 30 more

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Split() will allow you to take far more control over the data in your documents and do some wildly wonderful things

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First - let’s just learn how it works.

The Split() formula is like saying:

Hey Coda, Im going to give you some information - Can you turn it into a list with distinct items?

Split() takes two arguments

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Text

This is the text you want to turn into a list

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Delimiter

This is the character that defines where/how your text will be split

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Here’s some test text:

Coda is a no-code tool that lets you do almost anything

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Now define your own delimiter. Try these 5 as an example in the box below:

A blank space (just press the space bar on your keyboard

The letter a

The hyphen symbol: -

The letters cod

The letters Cod

Delimiter:

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Output:

Coda is a no-code tool that le Show 25 more

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Notice what it is doing. When split() changes text into a list there a couple things to be aware of:

It takes the character and deletes it from the list. When you used the letter a as your delimiter it turned the sentence into a list without any a characters in it whatsoever

Your delimiter is case-sensitive. Cod and cod split your sentence in different ways. If you want to get around this you can use the lower() formula to change everything to lowercase

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Second - Where and how to use this

So why is this useful? Lets look at just a couple use-cases

1. Turning a list of text into rows

Sometimes you may want to input a large amount of data into distinct rows. If the incoming data is in an un-friendly format that doesn’t allow you to copy/paste into rows, you can use a combination of split() and formulaMap() to turn that information into rows.

Take for example this list of US States:

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Alaska,Alabama,Arkansas,American Samoa,Arizona,California,Colorado,Connecticut,Delaware,Florida,Georgia,Guam,Hawaii,Iowa,Idaho,Illinois,Indiana,Kansas,Kentucky,Louisiana,Massachusetts,Maryland,Maine,Michigan,Minnesota,Missouri,Mississippi,Montana,North Carolina,North Dakota,Nebraska,New Hampshire,New Jersey,New Mexico,Nevada,New York,Ohio,Oklahoma,Oregon,Pennsylvania,Puerto Rico,Rhode Island,South Carolina,South Dakota,Tennessee,Texas,Utah,Virginia,Virgin Islands,Vermont,Washington,Wisconsin,West Virginia,Wyoming

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We can turn all that information into rows with the click of a button:

Turn text into Rows

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Heres the formula that does it

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State List 2

State List 2

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2. Find Word Count

Type in a sentence into the yellow box below and see its word count outputted to the right

Sentence

Word Count

This is a sentence with some words in it

You sentence has 9 words

There are no rows in this table

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3. Extract First and Last Names

split() is a very handy formula when you want to extract first and last names from a column that contains only full names. There are a couple different ways you can find first and last names. One is simple and will only catch simple cases, and the other is a little more complex but should work in far more cases. But they both use split()

I recommend using the complex way to more reliably catch first-names. Notice how the red row below is an individual with two first names. In cases like this you will need the more complex method.

First and last names

First and last names

Full Name

Simple First

Simple Last

Complex First

Complex Last

Scott Weir

Scott

Weir

Scott

Weir

Alicia Alvarez Mon-Zeid

Alicia

Mon-Zeid

Alicia Alvarez

Mon-Zeid

Luke Skywalker

Luke

Skywalker

Luke

Skywalker

There are no rows in this table

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Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.

SplitSplit

Before everything - What is this formula?

First - let’s just learn how it works.

Second - Where and how to use this

1. Turning a list of text into rows

2. Find Word Count

3. Extract First and Last Names

Split
Split