Merge Field String Match Filtering

Very frustrated as can not make MERGEFIELDs work as every Help message I can find seems to indicate they should.

I'm producing a directory but some people do not want their phone numbers or email info included, so in the directory, Excel DB, I included a field mask called "Hide" with the form of... 1000, 101, 1, etc that is, a "1" in each character position of the listing field that people potentially might not want listed.

So if the DB field order is "email1, email2, cell1, cell2" then a "110" mask would hide the email2 and cell1 listings.

My filter code for say the eMail2 text to be inserted into the Directory is...
{IF{ MERGEFIELD "Hide"} = "*1??" "—" {MERGEFIELD eMail2 }}

ALWAYS triggers on the TRUE result so I get "---" printed no matter whether there is a 1000, 100, 1, etc in the DB mask.

I only want the filter to be true when there is a "1" in the 3rd position from the right side of the string without regard to any other "1's" in the data.

The "??" wild-cards seem to be acting more like "*" and I can't figure any way to make it work.

What am I doing wrong?

Originally Posted by ken b

Very frustrated as can not make MERGEFIELDs work as every Help message I can find seems to indicate they should.

I'm producing a directory but some people do not want their phone numbers or email info included, so in the directory, Excel DB, I included a field mask called "Hide" with the form of... 1000, 101, 1, etc that is, a "1" in each character position of the listing field that people potentially might not want listed.

So if the DB field order is "email1, email2, cell1, cell2" then a "110" mask would hide the email2 and cell1 listings.

My filter code for say the eMail2 text to be inserted into the Directory is...
{IF{ MERGEFIELD "Hide"} = "*1??" "—" {MERGEFIELD eMail2 }}

ALWAYS triggers on the TRUE result so I get "---" printed no matter whether there is a 1000, 100, 1, etc in the DB mask.

I only want the filter to be true when there is a "1" in the 3rd position from the right side of the string without regard to any other "1's" in the data.

The "??" wild-cards seem to be acting more like "*" and I can't figure any way to make it work.

What am I doing wrong?

I faced the same problem while I was sending some data from my excel sheet to someone's email. That data was related to the edubirdie which you can check over here and whenever I tried to send the data, it merges the all data and I am in stress for this.