String Extraction

autonomy2

Hi Support.

I need to be able to extract a string of characters from a business object attribute (Plain Text) using FIND or EXISTS to perform a series of processes / validation etc...

The only known constant is that the string will start with the "[" character and end with the "]" character. The number of characters between these 2 symbols will vary.

Could you please let me know the syntax / process to carry this out?

tford

Are you saying you need to extract 1 string out of each instance of the BO that contains [ and ] ?

For example, for the BO:
BO.textattribute = xxxxxxxxx[TextIwantToExtract]yyyyyyyyyyyy

You need to extract it to: TextIwantToExtract ??

From the functions in AwareIM for text manipulation, I don't see any way to identify the location of [ and ]. The only functions I see that would help are CHARS_FROM_LEFT, CHARS_FROM_RIGHT and possibly length. I think you would also need to ID the location of [ and ] and a have a MID function that is available in some languages to pull characters from the middle of a string.

I don't think it can be done within AwareIM, unless support has other thoughts.

Toom

autonomy2

Hi tford.

I've tried to use the regular expressions found in Appendix E to no avail.

Hopefully there is a simple way to do this...

aware_support2

Try using function REPLACE with regular expressions to replace the leading characters including the "[" (something like '.[') with empty string, then the trailing characters starting with the "]" (something like '].') with empty string. What's left is your desired text.

autonomy2

Thank you!

tford

autonomy2,

Can you share the exact formula you used?

Thanks,
Tom