Solved - Escaping / Substituting a backslash from a text columns [formula]

I’m creating this thread because i searched for hours and couldn’t find a solution to this issue so I want to save someone else this stress.

If you have a text field that might contains slashes, specifically the backslash \

e.g look at my \backslash\ text

The only way to escape this \ character is to use both sets of quotation marks ' ' & " " in your SUBSTITUTE formula

SUBSTITUTE({Text_field}, '\\' , "replacement_text")

There’s a limitation in the formula column that doesn’t let you escape \\ if you use the regular quotation marks twice "\\". it tries to escape the second quotation mark…

1 Like

Thanks @SystemsAdminVB for sharing this.

Strangely enough CHAR is a supported function, but

SUBSTITUTE({Text_field}, CHAR(92), "replacement_text")

does NOT work. Definitely a bug…