MID

Description

Use this function to extract a specific number of characters from the middle of a text string, starting at a specified position. Supported in Chains.

MID is useful for extracting substrings, parsing data, and manipulating text in various ways.

MID(text, start_num, num_chars)

This function accepts the following arguments:

Name	Required	Description	Valid input
`text`	Yes	The text string containing the characters you want to extract.	A text string, or a reference to a cell containing text.
`start_num`	Yes	The position of the first character you want to extract in text.	A positive integer, a cell reference that contains a positive integer, or a formula which results in a positive integer.
`num_chars`	Yes	The number of characters you want MID to return from text.	A positive integer, a cell reference that contains a positive integer, or a formula which results in a positive integer.

Use case	Formula	Explanation and Result
Extract a chunk of text from the middle of a string, given a starting position and length.	`=MID(B1, 4, 5)`	Starts at the 4th character of "Eggplant goulash" and returns the next 5 characters. Result: plant
Pull a short segment out of a formatted identifier, like part of a SSN-style number.	`=MID(B2, 5, 2)`	Starts at the 5th character of "123-45-6789" and returns the next 2 characters. Result: 45
Extract a substring from a fixed-width block of text.	`=MID(B3, 2, 5)`	Starts at the 2nd character of "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP" and returns the next 5 characters. Result: BCDEF
Extract the first few characters of a text string, starting from the beginning.	`=MID(B4, 1, 3)`	Starts at the 1st character of "Mid Example" and returns the next 3 characters. Result: Mid
Extract a fixed number of characters from the end of a string, without knowing its exact length in advance.	`=MID(B1, LEN(B1)-3, 4)`	Calculates the length of "Eggplant goulash" to find a starting position 3 characters from the end, then returns the following 4 characters. Result: lash

If start_num is greater than the length of text, MID returns an empty string.
If start_num is less than 1, MID treats it as 1.
If num_chars is negative, MID returns a #VALUE! error.
If num_chars is greater than the number of characters from start_num to the end of text, MID returns all characters from start_num to the end of text.
MID counts each character, including spaces and punctuation.

Combine MID with FIND or SEARCH to extract text based on the position of specific characters.
Combine MID with LEN to extract a specific number of characters from the end of a string.
MID can be nested inside other text functions for more complex text manipulation.
MID is useful for extracting specific fields when working with fixed-width data,
MID is case-sensitive, it treats uppercase and lowercase letters as different characters.