20

I'm trying to figure out how to identify IF a list of items in one cell contains a value or string.

EXAMPLE

Cell A1 contains sites, sheets, docs, slides.

I want cell B1 to display a 1 'if' cell A1 contains the string sites.

FORMULA

=if(A1 ?????? "sites", 1,0)

I'm not sure what to replace the ?????? within the above formula OR if this formula is possible. Any ideas on how to accomplish the desired outcome are greatly appreciated.

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28

You can use REGEXMATCH:

=IF(REGEXMATCH(A1, "sites"), 1, 0)

To explain, REGEXMATCH returns true if and only if the argument is a substring of your string.

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  • 8
    Using regexmatch would be simpler: if(regexmatch(A1, "sites"), 1, 0). – user79865 Jul 19 '16 at 1:09
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    The "if" isn't needed since regexmatch already returns a boolean, so just "REGEXMATCH(A1, "sites")" – David Jan 18 at 17:17
  • The if is there so they can convert the true to a 1 or 0 if false – Aurielle Perlmann Jan 18 at 17:18
6

=if(search("sheets",B2)>0,1,0)

=if(IFERROR(search("sheets",B2)>0,0),1,0)

Both work. The second writes a 0 if there's an error.

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  • 2
    The first formula will never return 0 because SEARCH(search_for, text_to_search, [starting_at]) will return an error when search_for do not be found. – Rubén Jul 15 '16 at 23:05
1

A solution without REGEX:

=if(iserror(FIND("sheets",B2)),0,1)

capitalization matters and if logic must be reversed, given that answer is true when string is not found.

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  • This is basically the same as this answer, but introducing the case sensitive thing. By the way the sample data provided by the OP includes sheets not Sheets. – Rubén Jan 16 at 19:04
0

You're probably doing this because you want to know the count or average # of rows that have the word "sites" in it. Assuming you have 100 rows of entries in column A, you can use this function to find out how many rows have the word "sites" in it:

=QUERY(A1:A100, "select count(A) where A like '%sites%'")

This is much faster than creating a column of 1s and zeros and then operating on that new column.

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0

=IF(QUERY(A1, "where A contains 'sites'")<>"", 1, )

0

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