The REGEXREPLACE function in Google Sheets is a powerful tool that allows users to substitute specific parts of a text string based on defined regular expression patterns. By using this function, you can effectively manipulate and format text data to fit your needs, making it especially useful for cleaning up or reformatting data.

Syntax

REGEXREPLACE(text, regular_expression, replacement)

• text: The input string that contains the text to be modified.
• regular_expression: The regex pattern that identifies the segment of the text to be replaced.
• replacement: The string that will replace the matched text as defined by the regular expression.

Example #1

REGEXREPLACE("hello123world", "[0-9]+", "")

This function removes all numeric characters from the input string, resulting in “helloworld”.

Example #2

REGEXREPLACE("Email: test@example.com", "test", "user")

This function replaces the username in the email with “user”, resulting in “Email: user@example.com”.

Example #3

REGEXREPLACE("The quick brown fox", "quick|brown", "fast")

This function replaces the words “quick” and “brown” with “fast”, resulting in “The fast fox”.

Error handling

• ERROR: Invalid regular expression: This occurs when the regex pattern is incorrectly formatted and cannot be processed.
• ERROR: Not enough arguments: This indicates that one or more required parameters were not provided, leading to an incomplete function call.
• ERROR: No match found: This arises when the regex pattern does not match any part of the text string, resulting in the original text being returned unchanged.

Conclusion

The REGEXREPLACE function in Google Sheets is an invaluable resource for users needing to clean up text data or implement specific formatting changes. By understanding its syntax and error handling, you can harness the full potential of regex for efficient text manipulation.