String functions

String functions allow you to create expressions that manipulate text strings in a variety of ways.

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concat

Concatenates the expressions into a single string.

contains

Searches the string expression for a substring. Returns true if the substring was found, false otherwise.

decodeUrl

Returns a URL-decoded string.

encodeUrl

Encodes a URL string by replacing characters that aren't numbers or letters with percentage symbols and hexadecimal numbers.

endsWith

Checks if a string expression ends with a suffix. Returns true if does, false otherwise.

getCharacter

Returns the character at a given position from a string expression. Negative values for the position parameter are counted from the end of the string. If a position refers to a position outside the string, the function returns NULL.

indexOf

Returns the index of the first occurrence of a substring in a string expression. Starts to search forward from a given index. Negative values for the from parameter are counted from the end of the string. The default value for from is 0 (the search from the start of the string). The search is case-sensitive. If the defined substring is not found, the function returns -1.

lastIndexOf

Returns the index of the last occurrence of a substring in a string expression. Starts to search backward from a given index. Negative values for the from parameter are counted from the end of the string. The default value for from is -1 (search from the end of the string). The search is case-sensitive. If the substring is not found, the function returns -1.

levenshteinDistance

Computes the Levenshtein distance between two input strings.

like

Tests if a string expression matches a pattern. If the pattern does not contain percent signs, like() acts as the == operator (equality check). A percent character in the pattern (%) matches any sequence of zero or more characters. An underscore in the pattern (\_) matches a single character.

lower

Converts a string to lowercase.

matchesPhrase

Matches a phrase against the input string expression using token matchers.

matchesValue

Searches records for a specific value in a given attribute. Returns true or false.

punctuation

Extracts punctuation characters out of an input string.

replaceString

Replaces each substring of a string with a given string. This function replaces only exactly matched substrings from the original string to the replacement. Matching is case-sensitive and doesn't use any wildcards. All found patterns will be replaced if they do not intersect. For instance, replacing abcabca in a string with abca pattern produces only one replacement. Only the first occurrence at the beginning of the string will be replaced.

splitString

Splits a string according to the parameters set.
Retrieves an array of substrings of the specified expression that are adjacent to occurrences of the given pattern.
Parameters are interpreted literally. For example, splitting www.dynatrace.org by . results in www and dynatrace and org.
Using an empty string as a pattern splits the string into one-byte substrings. For example, a split of four characters becomes an array of four strings having one byte each (splitting the "1234" expression results in array("1", "2", "3", "4")).

If the pattern is not found in the expression, it returns an array that contains only the input expression.

If the expression starts with one or more occurrences of the pattern, an empty string will be added for each occurrence. For example, split("abc", "a") results in "", "bc". Analogically, empty strings are added if the pattern is found at the end of the expression.

An empty string is also added for adjacent occurrences of the pattern that do not border the start or end of the string. For example, split("abbc", "b") results in "a", "", "c".

If the pattern is empty, it splits the expression into one-byte substrings. For example, split("abc", "") results in "a", "b", "c".

startsWith

Checks if a string expression starts with a prefix. Returns true if does, false otherwise.

stringLength

Returns the length of a string expression. Length is defined as the number of UTF-16 code units, which is often the same as the number of characters in the string. In some cases, the number of characters is smaller than the number of UTF-16 code units, for example when Combining Diacritical Marks are used, or if characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), such as Emoji, are present.

If your use case requires consistent length for the same characters, consider ingesting strings after Unicode normalization.

substring

Gets a code unit range using a start index (inclusive) and an end index (exclusive).

Returns an empty string if from >= to.

Indexes >=0 are relative to the start of the string and address consecutive characters from left to right, starting from the index position.

Indexes <=-1 are relative to the last character of the string and are used to address characters from the right side of an expression, for example, -2 is the penultimate character.

Positive indexes beyond the bounds of the string are assigned to the string length.

Negative indexes beyond the bounds of the string are equal to 0. For example, in the 321 string, the index -4 is beyond the bounds of the string therefore it equals 0. However, the index -2 is located within the bounds of that string and extracts 21 if used as a from the index.

The returned substring never starts or ends with an incomplete UTF-16 surrogate pair. Instead of that, it starts or ends with a question mark. This safeguards against the creation of invalid Unicode strings.

trim

Removes leading and trailing whitespaces. Any code point <= ASCII 32 in decimal is considered a whitespace, where ASCII 32 is a blank space.

unescapeHtml

Unescapes HTML in a string by replacing ASCII characters with HTML syntax.

upper

Converts a string to uppercase.