Thanks for getting back John. Yes, I should have said: there is actually an instance where there are 17(!) email addresses for one individual.

For the purposes of what I'm trying...

Thanks Crow

Thanks crow1969; that worked very nicely and thanks for the tip re [^0-9]. Very helpful and much appreciated: thanks for taking the time and effort to get back to...

Thanks - option 2 worked. Thank you for taking the time to help me and for your patience. Much appreciated.

Yes, that's right. Thank you.

Thanks for getting back. In terms of the text that appears: it is constant and always the same, basically:

Working Reference : [then the digits] (text in brackets) -  loads more...

I have managed to solve all this with a CASE statement rather than an expression in SSRS, so no major worries about this unless someone has a solution to my...

I see, thanks. No sadly the : appears in exactly the same place in both instances so the neat solution offered above - for which many thanks - doesn't work...

Thanks for getting back but sorry you've lost me. Are you suggesting I replace ":" with "-" ? Apologies. Thanks.

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

I was also able to use successfully:

=Mid(Fields!my.Value,InStr(Fields!my.Value,":")+1,Instr(InStr(Fields!my.Value,":")+3,Fields!my.Value," ") - InStr(Fields!myValue,":") -1)

Sample data, which I should have provided:

DECLARE @t TABLE ( JobType NVARCHAR(50), JobStart DATETIME, JobFinish DATETIME )
INSERT INTO @t
(JobType,JobStart, JobFinish)
VALUES
('Type1', '20183103', '20180421')