Searches for a regular expression and replaces the portions that match the regular expression.
Built-in Function handler[]
Syntax:
replaceText(<stringToChange>, <matchExpression>, <replacementString>)
Examples:
replaceText("malformed","mal","well") -- returns "wellformed"
replaceText(field "Stats",return,comma) -- makes comma-delimited
Use the replaceText function to search for and replace text that matches a particular pattern.
The replaceText function replaces all the occurrences of the matchExpression with the replacementString. If more than one matching substring is found, the replaceText function replaces all of them.
The replaceText function is not as fast as the replace command, but is more flexible because you can search for any text that matches a regular expression.
The stringToChange and matchExpression are always case-sensitive, regardless of the setting of the caseSensitive property. (If you need to make a case-insensitive comparison, use "(?i)" at the start of the matchExpression to make the match case-insensitive.)
A number of characters in regular expressions have special meanings and need to be escaped with back slashes For example period (".") matches any character, so in order to replace period characters with a regular expression use "\." . For more information on regular expressions see the Perl documentation here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html
Parameters:
- stringToChange (string):
- matchExpression:A regular expression.
- replacementString (string):
- Returns:The replaceText function returns the changed string.
See also: caseSensitive (property), MatchText, MatchChunk, Offset, ItemOffset, LineOffset, find