Formatters
A formatter is another mechanism that helps ensure a standard output from the variable and sometimes inconsistent value input. Formatter can also clean the data values by removing extraneous characters that are not needed in the data. Formatters change the field value in the particular way that you specify.
For example, you might have a field that captures the Invoice number. The value for the field extracted from the document might have embedded spaces, but the real invoice number is the numerical value without any spaces. That value, the purely numerical value, is what you want to extract and store as the invoice number. In this case, you could use the Remove extra spaces formatter to remove all spaces from each Invoice number value.
- Change case
- Changes the capitalization of the field value. Available for string fields. Can change to:
- All lowercase
- All uppercase
- Capitalize first letter
- Clean up text
- Removes low confidence or non-printable characters from the field value. The system can introduce line endings or other characters that are not useful in the data value. For your application, you might want to have these characters removed from the data.
- Format number
- Formats a number. This formatter is available if the field type is Decimal or Numeric. The
following options are available:
- Add thousands separator
- Truncate after decimal
- Round up or down
- Insert text
- Inserts characters at a position that you specify, for example you might want to insert a decimal point, dash, hyphen, or comma to format your data. Available for any type of field.
- Pad text
- Adds characters before or after your value to get a fixed length for this field. You also specify the total number of characters for this field value. Available for any type of field.
- Remove extra spaces
- Removes spaces and tab characters. Available for any type of field. Can remove:
- Leading spaces
- Trailing spaces
- All spaces
Specify the location of the space to remove:- From front
- From anywhere
- From end
- Remove punctuation
- Removes or replaces punctuation characters from the field value. Available for any type of
field.
To remove punctuation characters, enter a list of the characters to be removed in the Find option and leave the Replace with option blank.
To replace punctuation characters, fill in the Replace option. Any of the characters that are listed in the Find option are replaced with the text in the Replace option. If multiple characters are adjacent, then the replacement text is used once to replace all of the adjacent characters.
Specify the location of the punctuation characters:- From front
- From anywhere
- From end
- Remove text
- Removes text from your field value. Available for any type of field. String to Find: Enter the string (text) that you want to find in the field value. Then, select among the following methods:
- In place: Removes the characters that match the first instance of the specified string.
- Before: Removes all characters that are before the first matched instance of the specified string.
- After: Removes all characters that follow the first matched instance of the specified string.
- Replace text
- Replaces a specified text or regular expression in your field value. Available for any type of field.
- Replace regular expression
- Replaces a specified regular expression in your field value. Available for any type of field.
- String
- Formats a field to a specified string. Optionally, add a delimiter character to delimit the value that is formatted.
- Trim text
- Trims a field to a specified length by removing characters from the start or end of this field. Available for any type of field.