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About This Code

Brief Description:

Strip (or Replace) Multiple characters easily with @ReplaceSubstring

Rating:

Not Rated Yet

Contributor:

Steven Chapman

Category:

Lotus Formula

Type:

String functions

Notes Version:

R4.x, R5.x, R6.x

Last Modified:

24 Mar 2003

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Code / Description

REM "Recursively strip many characters from a string";

REM "Replace 'FldName' a field whose value needs to be stripped";
vStripField:=FldName;

REM "Enter each character that needs to be stripped, seperated as a list";
vL1:="~":"!":"@":"#":"$":"%":"^":"&":"*":"(":")";

REM "Shift list to left, dropping first element, and appending null string at end";
vL2:=@Subset(vL1; -(@Elements(vL1) -1)):"";

REM "Strip the string";
@ReplaceSubstring(vStripField; vL1; vL2);

Usage / Example

I've found myself trying to remove all kinds of different characters from input, by repeating the @ReplaceSubstring function multiple times, until I found out I could do this.

This method builds on the functionality that @ReplaceSubstring can take 2 lists as arguments, and works left to right.
By using this, and shifting the characters, we can replace all characters in the first list.
This works like this, in simpler terms-

vString:="ABC#DEF^";
@ReplaceSubstring(vString; "#":"^"; "^":"")

In that example, @ReplaceSubstring scans through the string the first time, replacing all "#" with "^". The second time, it scans the string again, and replaces all "^" (which some were originally "#"), and replaces them with "".

Comments

Posted by Grant R Lindsay on 06/09/2003 02:30:40 PMVery inventive

I enjoy seeing the ideas that other developers come up with. Here is another approach, if all that is needed is to remove the unwanted characters: tRemoveThese := "!" : "@" : "#" : "$"; @ReplaceSubstring( "!A@S#D$F"; tRemoveThese; "" ) This will return: "ASDF" -- Grant