How to substring in Excel between different characters? - excel

Question

first-time poster so please bear with me. I am trying to convince Excel to do a substring and failing miserably. The task is simple enough on the surface of it, extract text that's between a fixed set of chars (+, -, * and /), basically mathematical operators.
My input string looks like this:
A+B+C+D
Now, if my string looks like that, or like A-B-C-D, all is good, I can use this and it works (not my code, found on https://exceljet.net/formula/split-text-with-delimiter and modified to suit my needs:
First text: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),0*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Second: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),1*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Third: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),2*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Forth: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),3*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
And all is good, until I have a string like: A-B+C-D or wahtever combo, basically not all the same char.
I tried using Find and Search in different configurations, but I always come to the same problem:
Using substitute gives me the n'th occurance and that's no good as - may be my second symbol or third
Can't dynamically and accurately calculate the length for MID, as it does Nr. of chars, not "until"
I can't use VB script for security reasons, so I am stuck trying to use Excel formulas.
It HAS to be one formula, as in the end, it's part of a bigger formula that's something like this:
CONCATENATE(IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)))
So I have the input in a cell and my result has to do all the processing in an adjacent cell.
Thank you in advance, at whit's end over here.

Answer 1

You can try FILTERXML() function.
=TRANSPOSE(FILTERXML("<t><s>"&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"+","|"),"-","|"),"*","|"),"/","|"),"|","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s"))
If you are not on Excel365 then try below formula.
=FILTERXML("<t><s>"&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE($A1,"+","|"),"-","|"),"*","|"),"/","|"),"|","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s[" & COLUMN(A1) &"]")
To learn FILTERXML() go through this article from #JvdV

Answer 2

For lower versions of Excel following formula would work by copying across as much as needed:
=TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(" "&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE($A1,"+"," "),"-"," "),"/"," "),"*"," ")," ",REPT(" ",99)),99*COLUMNS($A1:A1),99))
which is fairly similar to what has been posted on Exceljet site.