Let's consider how we can modify or format pulled data (cut out some part of it, change, add any extra text, or for example, you'd like to round, group, or add symbols to the price).

First, I'm going to familiarize you with the fields Modifier and Replacement.

In order to leave a certain length of text, we can use Modifier – (.{0,*})(.{0,}) where the star means how many symbols will remain (including spaces and any symbols) with

Replacement – $1

To add some text before, after, or around the pulled data, we can use

Modifier – (^(.*)$)

Replacement – any_text_before $1 any_text_after

Possible to use one modifier or more together

To add the missing protocol to the link, we can use

Modifier – ^// (if text starts with "//").

Replacement – https://

To change the path in a link, for example, if the image link starts with /image/

then we replace /image/ with http://rockway.biz/image/

Modifier – /image/

Replacement – http://rockway.biz/image/

For the next two examples, I'm going to use the price with the US Dollar sign

US $379.05

This is how it looks, pulled from a website, as it is.

We can change one symbol with another, for example, the dollar sign with the cent sign.

Draw your attention, that the dollar sign is already occupied for special regexp symbols, so it must be shielded with the backslash.

Also, we can cut out the US $ part from the start (first modifier) and add the NZ $ to the end (second modifier)

If you didn't familiar with regular expressions at this moment, I recommend you to use this resource to read about and this one to try and test it in a practice way.

Let's consider one more useful option and try to round, group, or add some symbols to our data.

The fields Format and Separator give us such a possibility.

By the way, these fields work only with data consisting of numbers with no spaces (actually, that is why we've considered the Modifier field firstly)

First, we'll try to leave only 379.05 and delete the US $ to prepare our data for further use.

For this, we can use the Modifier field with the (\d+\.\d+) expression, based on a standard regular expressions template.

There are 11 Special Pattern Characters, but we'll cover the most important ones:

In the following examples, we will see how this works on a number 379.05

If the pattern is bigger than the number, zeros get added, while hashes get dropped, both in the integer and in the decimal parts.

If the decimal part of the pattern can't contain the whole precision of the input number, it gets rounded.

Here, the .05 part has been rounded to .10, and then the 0 has been dropped:

Here, the .05 part has been rounded to 0.00, then the .00 has been dropped and the 379 has stayed as it was:

The grouping separator is used to specify a sub-pattern which gets repeated automatically:

Draw your attention to the fact that the Separator will be set as a dot by default, and after it has been set once after the first three symbols - it will be repeated after every three characters in a result.

Also, you can set any symbol as the Separator (in my example, I've used the dash)

It's possible to mix String literals within the pattern:

It's also possible to use special characters as String literals through escaping:

And of course, we can combine all considered options in one formatting template ;)

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