In my last post, I demonstrated applying conditional formats when text starts with a given value. But what if you just want to know if your text contains that value (beginning, middle, end, wherever)?

We can use that same indexOf function provided by List Formatting. This function tells you the first index (starting character position) of some text within your text. The index starts at 0 and if the text isn’t found then the result is -1. Here are some sample inputs and results:

Expression	Result
“=indexOf(‘Unreliable Peanut’, ‘U’)”	0
“=indexOf(‘Unreliable Peanut’, ‘e’)”	3
“=indexOf(‘Unreliable Peanut’, ‘reliable’)”	2
“=indexOf(‘Unreliable Peanut’, ‘p’)”	-1
“=indexOf(‘Unreliable Peanut’, ‘tasty’)”	-1

As you can see, you can pass in a single character or a whole word/phrase. You can also see that this function is case-sensitive.

How does knowing the index help us? The key is that the result is always -1 when the value is not contained within the text. So we can reverse that logic to know when our text contains a value.

Here’s some examples:

Expression	Field Value	Result
“=if(indexOf(@currentField, ”) != -1, ‘Yes’, ‘Nope’)”	Done	Yes
“=if(indexOf(@currentField, ”) != -1, ‘Yes’, ‘Nope’)”	Project Done	Yes
“=if(indexOf(@currentField, ”) != -1, ‘Yes’, ‘Nope’)”	So Done!!	Yes
“=if(indexOf(@currentField, ”) != -1, ‘Yes’, ‘Nope’)”	In Progress	Nope

Let’s see it in action! Here’s a simple format using the logic above to turn the text red whenever the field contains the word “dead”:

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/column-formatting.schema.json",
  "elmType": "div",
  "txtContent": "@currentField",
  "attributes": {
    "class": "=if(indexOf(@currentField,'dead') != -1, 'ms-fontColor-redDark','')"
  }
}

But what about that last entry? Remember the indexOf function is case-sensitive which may be exactly what you want sometimes. But in this case, that capital D is really messing us up.

Case-Insensitive Contains

Fortunately, we can combine our indexOf function with another function provided by List Formatting, toLowerCase to negate the casing issue.

toLowerCase takes one text parameter and returns that value in all lowercase. So now we can wrap our field value in toLowerCase and always search using a lower case value:

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/column-formatting.schema.json",
  "elmType": "div",
  "txtContent": "@currentField",
  "attributes": {
    "class": "=if(indexOf(toLowerCase(@currentField),'dead') != -1, 'ms-fontColor-redDark','')"
  }
}

PnP Sample: text-contains

Aw Yeah!!!

Now your formats can be even more dynamic and awesome! In my next post, we will take this idea even further! Wowee!

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