How do you use the SPLIT function to separate unseparated characters in Google Sheets?

SPLIT will work:

=SPLIT(A2,"?",0,1)

Here, SPLIT views the split character (i.e, "?") as the same whether there is 1, or whether there are 500 of them in a row.

Of course, this can be applied to an entire column as well:

=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="","",SPLIT(A2:A,"?",0,1)))

Your post shows "?" as the non-numeric characters. However, you may simply have meant that those question marks stand for any of various non-numeric characters. In that case, use this:

=SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2:A,"[^0-9]","?"),"?",0,1)

...or for the whole column...

=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="","",SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2:A,"[^0-9]","?"),"?",0,1)))

Each line of your data file is 12 characters long, and consists of four elements: two digits, twp question marks, five digits and three question marks. The question marks are separators.

SPLIT is not a good option in this case because the separators are not consistent. Try MID instead.

• =value(mid(A1,1,2)) - will return the first two characters
• =value(mid(A1,5,5)) - will return the five character sequence

If you use MID alone, it will return a string. I have wrapped the formula in the VALUE function in order to return a value. You can ignore this if the string is all you need.