Help Needed: Extract text string using very specific criteria

what are the middle 4?
F-STRR-HJ-HL-NH-BLGR-L
STRR-HJ-HL-NH
or
HJ-HL-NH-BLGR

Hi Sajo90 and welcome to the forum.

This formula should do what you need.
=SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"-",REPT(" ",LEN(A2))),LEN(A2)*2,LEN(A2)*4))," ","-")

See the attached for proof.

I agree with Martin that the "middle 4" may be a problem if there are only 2 dashes.

Originally Posted by Sajo90

...if I wanted to include the first 6?...

Hello,

Here is one way:

=LEFT(A1,FIND("^",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","^",6))-1)

Change in this formula
=SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"-",REPT(" ",LEN(A2))),LEN(A2)*2,LEN(A2)*4))," ","-")
to
=SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"-",REPT(" ",LEN(A2))),LEN(A2)*2,LEN(A2)*6))," ","-")

OK - here is what this fancy formula does.

It takes each dash "-" and replaces it with a bunch of spaces. The number of spaces is the length of the original string.
We do this knowing the TRIM() function will reduce those spaces down to a single space at the end.

Then we simply pick which part we want and trim it down.

Example:

Will-this-work?
replace all the "-" with 15 spaces. There are 15 characters in "Will-this-work?" and you get
Will...............this...............work? (each dash is now replaced with 15 spaces)

To extract the "this" we Trim() the above string from character 15 to 30 using the Mid() function.