I have a column of coordinates. I need help to remove the outer square brackets from the co-ordinates

[Jacknife]

[[[93.898528, 24.796308], [94.144976, 24.796308], [94.144976, 25.04976], [93.898528, 25.04976]]]
[[[150.520928608, -34.1183470085], [151.343020992, -34.1183470085], [151.343020992, -33.578140996],[150.520928608, -33.578140996]]]
[[[76.84252, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.879322], [76.84252, 28.879322]]]
[[[-88.473228, 30.144425], [-84.888247, 30.144425], [-84.888247, 35.008029], [-88.473228, 35.008029]]]
[[[76.84252, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.397657], [77.347652, 28.879322], [76.84252, 28.879322]]]

So these are a few coordinates from the column. I just need to erase the single outer pair of square brackets from the co-ordinates. Manually erasing them would be a tedious job as I have thousands of entries. Is there any way to handle this in LibreCalc?
Thank You,

[JohnSUN]

Do you want to remove only the first and last character from the string? Then why not take advantage

=MID(A2;2;LEN(A2)-2)

or something similar?
If you want to remove ALL square brackets from a string, then the tip @Grantler or @anon73440385 or the formula

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1;"[";"");"]";" ")

will help you.

However, in this case, you will get not a set of coordinates, but just a string of values ​​separated by commas.
Perhaps it would be better to use “Text to columns” with a comma and square brackets to get a set of numbers in separate cells of the table?

[anon73440385]

My solution doesn’t remove All square brackets - just to be clear (but assumes that everything between starting [[[ and ending ]]] is in one cell, i.e. the question contains 5 rows in 1 column)

[JohnSUN]

@anon73440385 Yes, of course! I did not very well formulated the phrase. Accept my apologies!

[anon73440385]

@JohnSUN - No problem at all. I’m sure you know better than me. Added the comment just for clarification of the reader and OP.

[Grantler]

Find&Replace, [x] Regular expressions

Find All \[|\] finds every square bracket

Replace All (nothing) will delete each one

[anon73440385]

Hello

If I understand the question correctly you only want to remove the bracket [ leftmost and the bracket ] rightmost. All other brackets should be kept. If that understanding is correct - use:

• Select the column containing your coordinates
• Edit -> Find & Replace
  Find: \b\[(.+)\]\b
  Replace: $1
  Other Options 1: [x] Current selection only
  Other Options 1: [x] Regular expressions
• Click button Find All to check, whether everything looks OK
• Click button Replace All if previous step found all cells which should be changed.

Tested using LibreOffice:

Version: 6.4.3.2; Build ID: 747b5d0ebf89f41c860ec2a39efd7cb15b54f2d8
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 4.12; UI render: default; VCL: kf5; 
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US; Calc: threaded

Hope that helps.

If the answer helped to solve your problem, please click the check mark () next to the answer.

[Jacknife]

Hey , thanks Opaque. That worked. Marking this as correct answer. I just wanted to ask what does the Current selection only option do? Because when I select that option it skips some entries and when not selected it considers all the entries.

[anon73440385]

My Fault - sorry since a added the Find All step here and did not mention that you need to reselect the whole column again. The option is what it says: The find & replace is only performed on the selected range to avoid unintentional changes and I recommend to never ever leave it unchecked. But after Find all the selection changed to the cells found, which is a smaller range (in general) than your original selection.

[Jacknife]

@anon73440385. Also is there any way to check whether this column consisting of coordinates contains any alphabets or text?

[anon73440385]

Yes (e.g function =REGEX(A1,".+[:alpha:].+","alpha character found") will find alpha characters) but what do you want to do (Conditional formatting to highlight cells having a character, another Find & Replace, a warning column)? Please post a new question, since it is may be a new task requiring a new solution and this site isn’t meant being a forum but being a collection of solutions.