Need to remove non-matching text from a delimited Excel string - excel

Question

I have an Excel database query to get all the RBAC user roles that are assigned to each user, and the database returns a string delimited by & (ampersands) between each user role, e.g.:
&Admin&Supervisor&ViewReports&WriteReports&
My query filters records that only have a matching string, let's say it's Reports. However it still returns the full list of user roles for a matching user, and in this case some users have >10 roles assigned and it makes the table look really messy and not suitable for printing.
I could manually clean up each row, but there are quite a lot of them, and since this is going to be run regularly I'm wondering if there may be a good Excel formula or VBS method to split delimited sections of a string and only keep ones that match a string criteria.
I'm aware of "Text to Columns" and its ability to make use of delimiters, but it just spat out a ton of columns and made things worse. I've done several searches about cleaning up delimited strings in Excel but couldn't find any results that were similar to my situation: need to split a delimited string and do something RegEx-esque to only keep parts that match a pattern.
Ideally I'd like to keep the cleaned up results in a single cell, so the above example &Admin&Supervisor&ViewReports&WriteReports& would look like:
ViewReports WriteReports
or
ViewReports,WriteReports
or similar, in a single cell. Not too picky about formatting really, just need the non-relevant parts of the string gone.

Answer 1

you could use a combination of trim, mid and substitute to find your values so using your example above:
if oyu have a blank excel sheet and ad your example to cell A3 then place 1,2,3 and 4 in cells B2, C2, D2, E2 then use copy this formula into cell B3:
=TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A3,"&",REPT(" ",LEN($A3))),(B$2-1)*LEN($A3)+1,LEN($A3)))
this should give you the value "Admin".
After that just pull formulas to the right and you will get all 4 values in your example
Please let me know if you need more explanation.
For more info on this equation please see webpage:
https://exceljet.net/formula/split-text-with-delimiter

Answer 2

This formula will work in Excel/Office 365. It won't work in earlier versions due to the TEXTJOIN function which appeared in 2016.
Assumes the data is simple strings as above (i.e. not an XML document that might contain duplicates of the created nodes. If that were the case, there is another method of splitting the string we could use).
Split the string on the ampersand with FILTERXML
Use a variation of the INDEX function to return an array of the matching sections
Concatenate those sections with TEXTJOIN
=TEXTJOIN(" ",TRUE,INDEX(FILTERXML("<t><s>" & SUBSTITUTE(A1,"&","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s"),N(IF(1,{3,5}))))
The …N(IF(1,{3,5}))… portion is how to return an array of values from the INDEX functions. In this case, 3 and 5 refer to the value before the third and fifth ampersand. Note that 1 would return an error, since there is nothing before the first ampersand.
You can return whichever elements you want. You just need to know (or calculate using the MATCH function), the proper index number(s).
Note that, with TEXTJOIN you can specify whatever delimiter you want. I specified a space, but you could specify comma or anything.