How to retrieve only part of a string

[Andy_HPSM]

Hello all,

I have a question that I am sure will be easy for many people, just not me...

I am reading and storing a long string into a trigger I setup on a table, and I need the first part of it only.  How can I get that either directly in the trigger, or by calling a Script?  I've tried the .before and .after functions that I saw in other places, but couldn't get them to work here.

Example string is

IM123456 The server is down US_Server Support 09:12:25

I can't figure out how to  get just the IM123456 out of the first part of the string.  There are no spaces in front of the IM#, so I just need to know how to read up until the first space.

Thanks ahead of time!

[Andy_HPSM]

I'll add what I have as of now.

thename is equal to "IM123456 The server is down US_Server Support 09:12:25" from my example

function getIMNumber( thename )
{
     if ( thename )
     {
       var im=thename;
       print("IM before function: ", im);
       im = im.before(" ");
       print("IM after function: ", im);
       return im;
     }
     else
       return false;
  }

The error I am seeing in the sm.log is

 1720(  2828) 07/01/2014 12:36:13  RAD E Script 'GetIMNumber'  line 7: ERROR TypeError: im.before is not a function at char 1

[Jas1 · Accepted solution]

I'm not too familiar with the before function. You could try this. Copy from 1st character to the position of first space.

im = thename.substr(0,str.indexOf(' '));

[_qq]

The substr() method extracts parts of a string, beginning at the character at the specified position, and returns the specified number of characters.

Example

Extract parts of a string:

var str = "Hello world!";
var res = str.substr(1, 4)

The result of res will be:

ello

You can find the JavaScript String substr() Method in this link: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_substr.asp

[Andy_HPSM]

Thanks for the help, I got it to work.  A slight tweak was needed, but the end working function for others to see is this.

function getIMNumber( thename )
{
     if ( thename )
     {
       var im;
       print("IM before function: ", im);
       im = thename.substr(0,thename.indexOf(" "));
       print("IM after function: ", im);
       return im;
     }
     else
       return false;
}

[Jas1]

Opps, forgot to replace the str sample with your var name. 😉 Glad it worked.