PSA: Know your table/array data and mind your delimiters/separators!

  • 17 August 2020
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This is just a quick reminder/PSA (public service announcement😞

 

Whenever you are working with arrays or tables in Kryon RPA be very mindful of the separators (delimiters) you are using. With that, I mean: Know the type of data/content you are expecting your arrays/tables to contain vs the separators/delimiters you will be using when accessing this data! If you don't, things can go awry, and it will take time to figure out/debug.

 

An example to illustrate this point: Let's say you are developing a wizard in Kryon RPA (Studio) and need to access table (formatted) data using advanced commands. You may opt to use a "," to delimit columns and ";" to delimit rows. You test with a limited sample set (of data), and things look good. However, during production runs, all of a sudden, some data elements actually contain a "," or ";". This of course messes up your table data access and results in incorrect data/processing! As such, I always suggest using special characters or multiple characters as delimiters. E.g. ";;" vs ";" or ",," vs ",". If you want to be "extra safe", opt to use special characters. My (own) go-to characters are usually are "¬" and "¤" (for rows and columns).

 

I hope this comes in handy!


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