[SOLVED] REPLACE_PATTERN & Multiple Patterns

PointsWell

In my continuing hell of international telephone numbers and notation habits I am now trying to strip out all the crud that I have to allow people to add here

This means I have to remove ' ', '(', ')' and '-'.

It seems that you can't nest REPLACE_PATTERN so is there another way, other than multiple REPLACE_PATTERN to cover each of the different patterns?

Jaymer

Sean
Do you want me to write you a Java function to remove those 4 characters?

Contact.Phone = PHONE_STRIP(Contact.Phone)

if so, supply me with the working regular expression that achieves what you need.

jaymer...

BobK

PointsWell wrote
It seems that you can't nest REPLACE_PATTERN

What do you mean by that?
I have used something like the following:
BO.NewAttr = REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(BO.OldAttr, 'find1', 'replace1'), 'find2', 'replace2')

You still need multiple REPLACE_PATTERN statements, but they are inside each other and I call that nested.

PointsWell

BobK wrote
More to a solution to your problem:

If you need to remove all non-numeric characters, you only need 1 REPLACE_PATTERN like:

BO.JustNumbers = REPLACE_PATTERN(BO.AlphaNumeric, '[\D]', '')

\D matches any non-digit

It's little nuggets like this that make this forum such a powerful resource! And saves the very generous Jaymer from reinventing the wheel (though I was keen to have a peek inside the mystery that is Java to me). Now if only we could tag stuff in here better.

PointsWell

BobK wrote
PointsWell wrote
It seems that you can't nest REPLACE_PATTERN

What do you mean by that?
I have used something like the following:
BO.NewAttr = REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(BO.OldAttr, 'find1', 'replace1'), 'find2', 'replace2')

You still need multiple REPLACE_PATTERN statements, but they are inside each other and I call that nested.

That was exactly what I was trying to achieve but it seems that one of the characters that I was trying to replace needed to be escaped - it was causing an error on the console.