Strip(text) and Stripprintable(text)

Panorama X
1

When I plug something in that I copy from the web frequently I will strip the leading and trailing non printable characters and spaces.

Occasionally I get a string of text that does not work properly. So this time I investigated it.

I took a copy of the leading “spaces” to ascertain what ASCII or Unicode Character it is using this website.

https://babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html

This particular character is according to the above link is:

U+0020 : SPACE [SP]

It does not get stripped. In Panorama 6 or Panorama X.

For me it is not a huge deal but I am wondering what I am doing wrong.

Usually my procedure works-I have it as an automatic procedure when I paste or change a cell.

But sometimes it just doesn’t.

I below pasted the string that was problematic.

   info@cascademanufacturing.com

Thanks

2

I copied your text out of the forum and into the Formula Wizard. The strip( function absolutely does strip out this character, as this screenshot shoes.

image

Of course there is a high likelyhood that the text has been changed in the process of copying it to the forum, so this isn’t really definitive. But if the character really is a space (U+0200), the strip( function absolutely does strip it out. The stripprintable( function however, does not strip out spaces, nor is it supposed to. A space is a perfectly good printable character.

How are you doing that? In other words, how are you applying the strip( function to your text?

3

There is nothing problematic about that character. U+0020 is just a plain vanilla space.

4

Spaces are printable, right Dave, just look at what it calls itself.

In Panorama 6 here is the procedure:

Field “E-Mail Address”
«E-Mail Address»=strip(«E-Mail Address»)
«E-Mail Address»=stripprintable(«E-Mail Address»)
;this is redundant but just to see if there was a sequence issue
«E-Mail Address»=strip(«E-Mail Address»)

This runs automatically when you enter data into the cell but I also tried it with running the procedure from the action menu.

If I put a bunch of leading spaces into the text and paste it into the cell the leading spaces are removed. So I was not thinking about spaces are printable, which is absolutely true.

But that leading character that is invisible is not stripped.

There is likely a function for strip leading and trailing invisible and non printable characters but I have not looked for it yet.

Could it be something to do that this character is a Unicode Character and Panorama 6 basically looks for ASCII characters?

I have to try to replicate this again like earlier today on Panorama X but now it won’t do it. I just loaded in the latest b18 version of Pan X so perhaps that is the difference.

I will keep trying to replicate on Pan X but it IS a problem on Panorama 6. Albeit for me a very small problem.

Thanks Jim too.

5

In Panorama 6, but not Panorama X, a non-breaking space will not be stripped by the strip( function. Non-breaking spaces are fairly common in web pages. A non-breaking space is chr(202) in Panorama 6. In your unicode web page it would be U+00A0.

A non-breaking space is option-space on your keyboard.

The strip( function strips non-breaking spaces in both version 10.1.2 and 10.2.0 b18.

6

Thanks Dave,

My initial comment

“Spaces are printable, right Dave, just look at what it calls itself.”

sounded sarcastic. That was not my intent. It was must me reminding myself to look at the context of the function.

Thanks for your help amigo.

I will digest this but it seems I have my answer!

Merci beaucoup!