Quick quiz: How many Character functions are available in the JMP Formula Editor? A whopping 42! Needless to say, if you've got a character column and want to change it somehow, JMP probably has a function to do it for you.

Nine of those 42 functions are all (or mostly) about extracting some portion of a character value. Admittedly, this is one of the most common operation – taking some part of a larger string of characters. This is known as a substring.

The most obvious function for this is the Substr() function, but this function requires that you know exactly where the part you're interested in lies in the larger string. It also means that the part you want has to be in the same place in every string.

That's why I love the Word() function. It's amazingly flexible and works the way that I think.

The Word() function takes two required arguments and one optional.

Word(n, "text", <"delimiters">)

The Word() function divides the text up into words based on the delimiters you specified and returns the nth word. If you don't specify the delimiters argument then the default delimiter is the same one we use to separate words in sentences: a space.

The key to taking advantage of the Word() function is to view your strings as "sentences" and think abstractly about choosing delimiters.

Read the complete post, with examples, in the JMP Blog.