Read or Write Substitutions (Attribute or Field)

Use this dialog box to configure advanced read and write options for both attributes and recordset fields. Select either the Attribute Properties tab or the Recordset Fields tab and click Advanced in the Read or Write box.

Define the substitution you would like to perform by specifying the string you want to search for and the string you want to use as a replacement. You can include regular expressions to specify your substitutions. For example, to remove trailing blanks from an attribute or recordset, type \s+$ for the string to search for and leave the replacement specification blank. An example of how to add a substitution for a recordset is available here.

Regular expressions follow the ECMAScript standard ( JavaScript) for regular expressions, as described in section 15.10 of the ECMAScript Language Specification.

Note: Use regular expressions judiciously and only when necessary. Added performance overhead can occur when using regular expressions.

Substitution Examples

Purpose	Search For	Replace With
Remove leading blanks	^\s+
Remove trailing blanks	\s+$
Remove all spaces	\s
Remove symbols	<value>
Change negative numbers represented with parentheses(123)to be a negative sign -123.	$([0-9]+)$	-$1
Prepend value	(^.*$)	<value>$1
Append value	(^.*$)	$1<value>