I’m working with a Google Sheets document and need help with text manipulation. I have cells that contain product information, but some of them include extra details in parentheses that I don’t need.
For example, one of my cells contains Bread, Cheese, Nuts (Walnuts, Pecans) but I only want to display Bread, Cheese, Nuts without the parentheses part.
What’s the best formula or function to accomplish this? I’ve tried a few different approaches but can’t seem to get it working properly. Any suggestions would be really helpful!
for a quick fix, try find & replace. just hit Ctrl+H, search the parentheses part, and leave replace blank. it’s way faster than using formulas unless you want it to be automatic. did this with supplier info and it worked like a charm.
Here’s another way that works well - combine LEFT and SEARCH functions if you don’t want to mess with regex. Use =LEFT(A1,SEARCH("(",A1)-1) to grab everything before the opening parenthesis. Just heads up though - this only works when parentheses are actually there. No parentheses = error. For cells that might not have parentheses, wrap it in IFERROR: =IFERROR(LEFT(A1,SEARCH("(",A1)-1),A1). I’ve used this tons for cleaning inventory data and it’s solid, though the regex solution someone mentioned above is cleaner.
I’ve had the same problem with product descriptions. Use REGEXREPLACE in Google Sheets - just apply =REGEXREPLACE(A1,"\s*\([^)]*\)","") where A1 is your cell. It strips out anything in parentheses plus any spaces before them. Works way better than LEFT or SEARCH functions, especially if you’ve got multiple parentheses. Drag it down and you’re done.