SEARCH

Searches for a specific search string within a text and returns the index of the first occurrence

Description	The SEARCH() function is used to locate the starting position of a specific search string within a given text. It returns the character position of the first occurrence of the search string, or -1 if no match is found. This function is useful for tasks like pattern recognition and data extraction.
Syntax	SEARCH(text, search)

1. text: The input text string in which you want to search for the search string.

2. search: The search string you want to find within the text.

The SEARCH() function is case-sensitive, meaning it will only search text that exactly matches the specified search string in terms of both character sequence and letter case. If you need case-insensitive search, you may consider using REGEX_SEARCH() to achieve the desired result.

When the SEARCH() function returns -1, it indicates that there is no matching occurrence of the specified regular expression pattern or offset within the given text.

For example, if a user is looking for specific data and SEARCH() function returns -1, they might conclude that the desired data is not present in the document.

Example

Table

ID	Text
1	The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
2	Savant is an intelligent analytics tool.
3	There are no matches in this text.

Function

SEARCH(`Text`, "fox")

Results

SEARCH(Text, "fox")
17
-1
-1