Custom Delimiters To Avoid Incorrect Free Text Split Location

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1

I’m working on something that would allow users to view a record history within table data, both to allow for querying historical values and to have a sense of “audit trail” for a specific column value without having to delve into the entire audit trail for the record.

To do this, I would need to append new commentary to a variable value using some delimiter so the entries can be broken up later for easier viewing (i.e. splitting to an array).

For cases where the commentary could be any free text, perhaps including timedate, and normal punctuation, and perhaps even pasted text that could include other special characters…

Is there a best practice for defining a custom delimiter to avoid the comment entry being split at the wrong location?

I have been thinking of perhaps using a double character as the delimiter, in such a way that should “never” occur during normal editing, such as “;;”.

2

Chances are your data element doesn’t contain alt code 0151 so you can use this as your separator. https://www.alt-codes.net/ (Or whatever you prefer)

— 0151

3

Is there documentation of what character sets Tulip is able to use as delimiters, both for splitting strings and for adding to strings?

4

@jmlowden, all printable characters can be used as delimiters.

5

While researching uncommonly used characters, I came across a suggestion to search the string-to-be-appended for the delimiter. This should be feasible via trigger logic, and can provide an Error message to the user to revise the string accordingly to avoid an issue.

Will post my results here when I get around to it. :slight_smile: