How to Replace Various Characters Using Jasper Studio

How to Replace Various Unwanted Characters during Reporting Using Jasper Studio

Reporting in Business Intelligence is the representation of Data in a more meaningful manner
so at times we need to follow some few formats to make our data to the End-User or Clients more meaningful to their Business

Now in some cases
characters like

commas (,), asterisk (*) and periods (.) are not permitted
and permitted characters can be Ampersand (&) , hyphens (-)

so what do we do here?

since jasper has various text functions one in particular that can be used here will be

the replaceAll() method

so this can be done on the particular columns you want make the required changes.

Now Let’s go to the field column you want and edit the Expression.

In my case:
I would be editing the First Name Column to the required format
so now we use the replaceAll() method

My requirement is to remove all commas and replace it with a [space]
so a simple

$F{firstname}.replaceAll(“,”,” “).trim()

can be used
Note: if you are wondering and new to Jasper why i used trim(), I used a trim() here because at times a name can be in the form

Helical,IT Solutions,

Now with the $F{firstname}.replaceAll(“,”,” “) it gives us the result Helical IT Solutions [space] this hereby create an extra space at the End so
a trim() method is used to remove unwanted spaces at the End.

OK now you have an idea on how to replace unwanted characters with the required characters
Now go ahead and replace * with –

and . with [space]

Did you get and Error?

Indeed yes you will get an Error if you
wrote your expression as

 $F{firstname}.replaceAll(“,”,” “).replaceAll(“*”,” “).replaceAll(“.”,” “).trim()

and if you didn’t well skip this part 😉

ok now if “.” is kept it actually treats it as a . and not as “.” the character same goes with the “*”

so the appropiate expression would be

$F{firstname}.replaceAll(“,”,” “).replaceAll(“[*]”,” “).replaceAll(“[.]”,” “).trim()

 

well there are various way also to express the . as character and [.] is one of them
and now you are good to go

– Izebhijie Sohail Ehizogie

Note: Quotations are in the form of quotation open and quotation close

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