FINDLINES

The FINDLINES function determines the position of one or more lines in a multiline text expression.

Return Value

INTEGER

Syntax

FINDLINES(text-expression, lines)

Arguments

text-expression: A text expression within whose values you want to locate a certain line or group of lines. FINDLINES searches text-expression for the specified lines. The match must be exact, including a match of uppercase and lowercase characters. See "TEXT and NTEXT".
lines: A second text expression containing the line(s) for which you are searching. When lines is not found in text-expression, FINDLINES returns 0. When lines occurs more than once, FINDLINES returns the line number of its first occurrence.

Notes

Finding Multiple Lines

When you specify two or more lines, FINDLINES searches for all the specified lines as a single continuous block in text-expression. When all the lines occur in text-expression, but are not in a continuous block, FINDLINES returns 0 (not found).

NA Values

When the value of text-expression is NA, FINDLINES returns NA.

TEXT and NTEXT

FINDLINES accepts TEXT values and NTEXT values as arguments. When only one argument is NTEXT, then FINDLINES automatically converts the other argument to NTEXT before performing the function operation.

Examples

Example 13-21 Finding Two Sequential Lines

This example shows how to find the location of the two lines "products" and "services" in a multiline value in a TEXT variable called newlist. The newlistT variable has the following values.

salespeople
products
services
regions
priorities

The characters "\n" in the lines argument to the following FINDLINES function call indicates a line break to show that "product" and "services" are separate lines.

SHOW FINDLINES(newlist, 'products\nservices')

The result of this statement is