How to strip text before opening bracket in Airtable formula field

Other Questions Airtable
1

I’m working with an Airtable formula field that contains text in this format: “[ABC] Sample Text Here”

I need to create a formula that will detect when there’s a bracketed section at the beginning and remove it along with the space that follows it.

What I’m trying to achieve:

  • Input: “[ABC] Sample Text Here” should become “Sample Text Here”
  • Input: “Regular text ] Sample Text” should stay “Regular text ] Sample Text” (no changes since there’s no opening bracket at start)

Basically I only want to remove the bracketed part if it starts with an opening bracket. I’ve attempted a few different approaches but haven’t been successful yet.

Any suggestions on how to write this formula correctly?

2

I’ve hit this same formatting issue before. Here’s what works better for me - use REGEX_REPLACE if your base supports it: REGEX_REPLACE({Field Name}, '^\[.*?\] ', ''). This finds the opening bracket at the start, grabs everything until the closing bracket and space, then wipes it clean. No regex support? The IF and MID combo works fine too, just watch out for cases where there’s no space after the closing bracket - you’ll need to tweak the offset.

3

You can use LEFT, FIND, and MID functions in Airtable for this. First check if the first character is an opening bracket. If it is, find the closing bracket and grab everything after it. Try this formula: IF(LEFT({Field Name}, 1) = "[", MID({Field Name}, FIND("]", {Field Name}) + 2, LEN({Field Name})), {Field Name}). This’ll only modify text that starts with brackets, leaving everything else alone.