find and replace to not replace characters found as wildcards

Hey all,

I recently became owner of a spreadsheet with some issues, and I am trying to make it useful. Each row has a URL of a blog post, and I want to extract the date from it (which is present in each URL) while getting rid of the rest of the URL. I was able to get rid of everything up to the year (which comes first), but then the URL continues, for example, 2013/05/16/the-rest-of-the-url/ and I would like to just have 2013/05/16 remain.

I am trying to use find and replace with the find box reading 2013/??/??/*/ and replacing it with 2013/??/?? which effectively erases everything else in the url, but leaves ?? instead of the numbers. Is there any way to have it so that it keeps whatever was in the original box? Or is there a better way to go about doing this?

Thanks!

Ummm... upon deleting the old column, the new column will disappear. He needs to copy the results of the formula and paste-values before deleting the old column.

jhren,
You are of course correct, a Copy / Paste / Values would be required if he chooses to delete the column.
I should have been more specific.

Thanks for the reminder.

Thank you for your answers. That definitely did the trick, and I am glad to avoid dealing with find and replace.