Version

    Changing and Defining Delimiters

    Changing Record Delimiter

    Changing Default (Field) Delimiter

    Defining Non-Default Delimiter for a Field

    There are three types of delimiter: record delimiter, default field delimiter and field delimiter.

    Delimiters can be seen and edited in Metadata Editor. They are displayed in the fourth column (Delimiter column) of the Record pane.

    If the delimiter in this Delimiter column of the Record pane is grayish, this means that the default delimiter is used. If you look at the Delimiter row in the Details pane on the right side from the Record pane, you will see that this row is empty.

    Remember that the first row of the Record pane displays the information about the record as a whole instead of about its fields. Field numbers, field names, their types, delimiters and/or sizes are displayed starting from the second row. For this reason, if you click the first row of the Record pane, information about the whole record instead of any individual field will be displayed in the Details pane.

    • Multiple Delimiters

      If you have records with multiple delimiters (for example: John;Smith\30000,London|Baker Street), you can specify default delimiter as follows:

      Type all these delimiters as a sequence separated by \\|. The sequence does not contain white spaces.

      For the example above there would be ,\\|;\\||\\|\\ as the default delimiter. Note that double backslashes stand for single backslash as delimiter.

      The same can be used for any other delimiter, also for record delimiter and/or non-default delimiter.

      For example, record delimiter can be the following:

      \n\\|\r\n

      Also, remember that you can have delimiter as a part of field value of flat files if you set the Quoted string attribute of FlatFileReader to true and surround the field containing such delimiter by quotes. For example, if you have records with comma as field delimiter, you can process the following as one field:

      "John,Smith"

    • CTL Expression Delimiters

      If you need to use any non-printable delimiter, you can write it down as a CTL expression. For example, you can type the following sequence as the delimiter in your metadata:

      \u0014

      Such expressions consist of the Unicode \uxxxx code with no quotation marks around. Please note that each backslash character '\' contained in the input data will actually be doubled when viewed. Thus, you will see "\\" in your metadata.

    Java-Style Unicode Expressions

    Remember that since version 3.0, you can also use the Java-style Unicode expressions (except in URL attributes).

    You may use one or more Java-style Unicode expressions (for example, like this one): \u0014.

    Such expressions consist of series of the \uxxxx codes of characters.

    They may also serve as delimiter (like CTL expression shown above, without any quotes):

    \u0014