Dexterity: Checking for Special Characters in a String
Today, I responded on a Partner Forum thread about evaluating the contents of a string field. The question was:
“Is there a function that evaluates a string field to determine if it contains any special characters?”
I have written similar code in the past and decided to quickly create a function to perform two functions:
- Return a Boolean to indicate if a special character has been found
- Pass out a string containing only the normal (non-special) characters
This function identifies alphabetic (optionally including space) and numeric characters as normal and anything else as “special”.
Global Function: IsSpecial
function returns boolean OUT_Special;
in string IN_String;
in boolean IN_SpaceAllowed;
out string OUT_Stripped;
local string l_char;
local string l_string;
local integer i;
OUT_Special = false;
clear l_string;
for i = 1 to length(IN_String) do
l_char = substring(IN_String, i, 1);
if isalpha(l_char, IN_SpaceAllowed) or (l_char >= str(0) and l_char <= str(9)) then
l_string = l_string + l_char;
else
OUT_Special = true;
end if;
end for;
OUT_Stripped = l_string;
[/sourcecode]
The function uses the Dexterity isalpha() function as this will handle the extra extended alphabetic characters beyond the normal A to Z and a to z ranges such as é è ë ö ÿ etc.
I have also provided the option to decide whether spaces are to be included as alphabetic.
Hope you find this helpful.
David
This article was originally posted on https://www.winthropdc.com/blog.