Another simply SMAT search question

That is a little tougher. I expect someone else will come up with a better solution than this. But give it a shot and let us know if it worked. I don’t know what your ?: does so maybe that could replace my mess. The mess of stuff I used is supposed to match all reasonable characters but pipe. I took the ^ out of it.

Exact match

rPID(?:[^|]*|){5}(MUELLER^)

MUELLER somewhere in the middle

rPID(?:[^|]*|){5}([A-Z,a-z,0-9,/,-, ]*MUELLER[A-Z,a-z,0-9,/,-, ]*^)

I don’t think you need the parens around MUELLER^. I left them in. You need them around that first bit so the {5} is applied to the whole group of things in the parens.

Can you post an example of a name you are trying to match?

How about

rPID(?:[^|]*|){5}([^||^]*MUELLER[^||^]*)

The ?: means non-capturing parentheses, otherwise matches in parentheses can be captured to ordered variables.

A downside to above would be that numbers and other characters around MUELLER will also satisfy the regular expression.