I am using Quick Fields 9.0.
Here is the text that I copied from output pane from a zone OCR activity (with slight modifications for privacy reasons):
Top Half : Ll
k
....... 71%
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2014, 6:00 P.M.
Regular City Council Meeting
Regular X Public Financing Authority Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Agency to the
X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Housing Agency to the
X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special Fire Protection District Meeting
City Council Chambers
1 Y Drive
X, CA 90000
Cell Phones: As a courtesy to others, please silence your cell phone or pager during the meeting and engage in
conversations outside the Council Chambers.
Americans with Disabilities Act: If you need special assistance to participate in this meeting, please contact the
City Clerk at (123) 111-1111, ext. 1111. Notification 48 hours in advance will enable the City to make reasonable
The desired output for pattern matching is a multi-value token with five values:
Regular City Council Meeting
Regular X Public Financing Authority Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Agency to the X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Housing Agency to the X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special Fire Protection District Meeting
If I use the pattern Regular.*Meeting, I would get in the test area in the pattern matching activity:
"Regular City Council Meeting
Regular X Public Financing Authority Meeting"
When I run the actual session, the output would be the whole string:
"Regular City Council Meeting
Regular X Public Financing Authority Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Agency to the
X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special City of X as Successor Housing Agency to the
X Redevelopment Agency Meeting
Special Fire Protection District Meeting"
I understand that pattern matching is greedy, and the output from the actual session is the longest match for the pattern. I'm simply confused by how the test area handles a pattern with multiple matches, and why it displays different results from the actual session. (I figured out a pattern that works, so that's not my question.)
Another thing I ran into with this pattern matching exercise is how to deal with matches that include new line characters. When I use the match as a token to populate a field, the new lines do not display, so I end up with:
"Regular City Council MeetingRegular San Marcos Public Financing Authority MeetingSpecial City of San Marcos as Successor Agency to theSan Marcos Redevelopment Agency MeetingSpecial City of San Marcos as Successor Housing Agency to theSan Marcos Redevelopment Agency MeetingSpecial Fire Protection District Meeting"
I ended up using the substitution activity to replace any new line characters with spaces, but the substitution activity would aggregate all the values in a multi-value token into a single value separated by "; ". I then used an Assign Token Value activity to split the values back into a multi-value token, and I used to the trim function to get rid of the extra space that the substitution activity added.
Is there a simpler way to deal with new lines? I've had multiple clients that have patterns across multiple lines, and I have not been able to deal with them effectively. The way I do it currently seems very roundabout.