If you’ve ever been coached or trained in public speaking, you’ve probably been made painfully aware of your use of the dreaded filler words—words you say almost automatically when speaking and nervous. Everyone has their own flavor of it, but for me, it’s the word “like.” If I’m really nervous, I can end up sounding like Moon Unit Zappa in her single Valley Girl. (Millennials, ask your parents. Gen Z, ask your grandparents.)

But the word “like” gets a bad rap and in some uses is fine and perfectly acceptable, like making a comparison or at the beginning of a list talking about the uses of like. Today, though, I’m talking about like in the context of new features added to Synergy/DE in version 11. Which introduces the new system-supplied class Select.Where.Like.

If you aren’t familiar with the Select class in Synergy, where have you been? We’ve been harping on about this thing, like, forever. It’s a wonderful feature in the language for reading data in a SQL-like way. Well, the Select class now has even more functionality with the addition of the Like statement, allowing you to filter your alpha results based on a matching pattern. It’s similar to Where.Contains in that you can do the equivalent of Where.Contains with Where.Like, plus so much more. A Where.Contains is a Where.Like that has a “%” sign in the front and back, telling it to search the results for that string of characters anywhere in the field.

How does Select.Where.Like work?

Using the above wildcards, you can build your Where statement to look for a pattern inside a record field. For example, say you have a city address in the form CityName, ST(ate). Now let’s say you want all results from entries from CA where the city starts with “SAN”. What would this look like?

Where.Like(city_name,"San%,CA%")

Breaking this down, the first three characters are “San”, then there are one or more characters between “San” and our next part “,CA”, which can have one or more characters after it. This query should return results like San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Monica, and San Jose.

Note that you can do a Where.Like that is not case sensitive with NoCaseWhere.Like. The above statement wouldn’t find a city if “san” was in the body of the city name, like Pleasanton, CA. This is most helpful if your data is not uniform or consistent (like sometimes the state is ca or cA). To get the most use out of Where.Like, you should be familiar with your dataset and how information is entered and modified.

Getting an idea how this works

Let’s try something a little tougher. Let’s say you have data that contains postal codes, but the postal codes can be from different countries. Now you could combine your Where.Like with an AND to a field that has a country, but you could also handle it all within the Where.Like. For instance, let’s say the data has postal codes from three different countries: United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden. An example of each one would be

US: 99999
Sweden: 999 999
UK: varies but most commonly AA9 9AA

where 9 is a number and A is a letter.

If we wanted to be completely explicit, we could use these Where.Like statements:

US: [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] 
Sweden: [0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9]
UK: [A-Z][A-Z][0-9] [0-9][A-Z][A-Z]

This is a manual way to handle it, but maybe we can do it with less. If we want only US and Sweden, we can use the fact that UK postal codes have letters to our advantage and go with a simple

US & Sweden: [^A-Z]%

This essentially equates to any postal code that doesn’t begin with a letter, which works for our simplified version of these countries’ postal codes. The opposite, [A-Z]%, also works if you want UK only.

If we want to do Sweden and the UK, we note that both contain a space in their postal codes, so

UK & Sweden: %[ ]%

This includes any postal code with a space in it. Now this is tricky, as these could be Synergy alpha types, and there might be trailing spaces at the end. To fix this scenario, we use a wildcard to say there is a number or letter after the space:

UK & Sweden: %[ ][0-9]%

This means that we are looking for a space with a number immediately following. However, unlike the last example, we can’t use the opposite of this to get US only, because %[^ ][^0-9]% actually works for all three countries if there are trailing spaces; a letter or number at the end followed by a non-numeric character works. For example, a UK postal code ending in “G” with trailing spaces satisfies this condition.

What’s unique about US postal codes, though, is that there are a series of four numbers in a row, and they have fewer total characters than the other two. Therefore, %[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]% would work, as would _ _ _ _ _  % (i.e., five wildcard spaces followed by a literal “ ”), as there would be a space afterwards if this were an alpha field, whereas it would be a numeric or alpha character in the UK or Swedish postal codes. Of course, this would be quite different in practice, because your searches would look more like “98_ [0-9]%” if you were looking for Swedish postal codes starting with 98. But the purpose here is to get you thinking with wildcards. This new feature has a lot of potential to optimize searches as it does when used inside of SQL. Be sure to try it out now in Synergy 11 and read more about this feature in our online documentation.

Synergy/DE 11 is bringing many new features, and among those additions are some exciting new abilities within the String class. All of these powerful new features are available in both traditional and Synergy .NET.

When dealing with strings, keep in mind that a string is immutable (fancy word for unchangeable), so any time a string variable is changed, a new string variable is created.

First, let me list the new methods added, along with existing methods that include new overloads to the String class: 

String.IsNullorEmpty(@string) , boolean

• Parameter: String to interrogate for null or empty value
• Return value: Boolean value indicating whether the string is null or empty

String.IsNullorWhitespace(@string) , boolean

• Parameter: String to interrogate for null or white-space characters
• Return value: Boolean value indicating whether the string contains null or white-space characters

New overloads to give precise control on how a string is trimmed:

String.Trim() ,string			(exists prior to version 11)

• Parameter: None
• Return value: String with leading and trailing white-space characters removed

String.Trim(@string) ,string 

• Parameter: Character(s) to be removed from the string’s beginning and end
• Return value: Returned string with passed-in character(s) removed from the beginning and end

String.TrimStart(@string) ,string
String.TrimEnd(@string) ,string

• Parameter: Character(s) to remove from either the string’s start or end
• Return value: String with all instances of character(s) removed from start or end

New methods to control how characters are removed or inserted into a string:

String.Remove(N) ,string

• Parameter: Starting position in the string to remove all characters until its end
• Return value: String with all characters from passed starting position to end removed

String.Remove(N) ,string

• Parameter: Starting position in the string to remove all characters until its end
• Return value: String with all characters from passed starting position to end removed

String.Insert(N, @string) ,string

• Parameters:
  1. Starting position to insert string passed as parameter 2
  2. String to be inserted
• Return value: Returned string with sting passed in parameter 2 inserted

New overloads to give more control on concatenating strings together:

String.Concat(@string, @string) ,string	(exists prior to version 11)
String.Concat(@string, @string, @string) ,string
String.Concat(@string, @string, @string, @string) ,string
String.Concat([#]@string) ,string

• Parameters:
  1. Two strings to concatenate together
  2. Three strings to concatenate together
  3. Four strings to concatenate together
  4. Dynamic string array to concatenate all elements together
• Return value: Returned string after concatenation operation

New overloads to locate the position of a substring in a string:

String.IndexOf(A1) ,int			(exists prior to version 11)
String.IndexOf(A1, N) ,int
String.IndexOf(A1, N, N) ,int		(exists prior to version 11)

• Parameters:
  1. Character(s) to find in string
  2. Character(s) to find in string starting at position specified in parameter 2
  3. Character(s) to find in string starting at position specified in parameter 2 for the length of parameter 3
• Return value: Integer value with first position of passed character(s)

New overloads to find the last occurrence of a substring in a string:

String.LastIndexOf(A1) ,int		(exists prior to version 11)
String.LastIndexOf(A1,N) ,int
String.LastIndexOf(A1,N,N) ,int		(exists prior to version 11)

Parameters:

• Parameters
  1. Numeric value of the starting position to begin returning the substring
  2. Numeric value of the length of the substring to return
• Return value: Returned substring with value from the specified starting and length values

New methods to create an array from a delimited string:

String.Split(A1) ,[#]string
String.Split(A1, StringSplitOptions) ,[#]string (see below for the StringSplitOptions enumeration)

• Parameters:
  1. Character(s) to use a delimiter
  2. Enumeration StringSplitOptions to control if empty elements are created
  3. Return value: Dynamic string array to be populated with the contents of the passed string

New overload to use the replace method on alphas:

String.Replace(A, A) ,string

• Parameters:
  1. Alpha value to be replaced by parameter 2
  2. Alpha value to replace all occurrences of parameter 1 in string
• Return value: Returned string with all occurrences of parameter 1 replaced by parameter 2

String.Replace(@string, @string) ,string 	(exists prior to version 11)

• Parameters
  1. String value to be replaced by parameter 2
  2. String value to replace all occurrences of parameter 1 in string
• Return value: Returned string with all occurrences of parameter 1 replaced by parameter 2

And finally, the enumeration StringSplitOptions, which is used with the Split method to control if empty elements are created when creating the string array:

public enum StringSplitOptions
    None		,0
    RemoveEmptyEntries	,1

You can find details on all String members in the System.String topic in the Synergy/DE documentation.

As I mentioned earlier, some of the above are brand new methods (Insert, IsNullorWhitespace, Remove, Split, TrimEnd, TrimStart) added to the System.String class, while others are new overload methods added to existing methods to provide additional functionality. Interestingly, the runtime itself will make use of the String.Concat method when strings are added together (e.g., string1 + string), as it is efficient and generates fewer temporary variables.

Now let’s take a look at one of the new methods. Using the new Split method, we can populate a dynamic array from a delimited string. Say we have a string containing the following:

mystring = “Bob, Mary, Joe, Jack,,,, Fred, Henry, Tom”

We’d like for the values between the commas to be elements in an array, but we don’t want the commas without values between them to become empty elements in the array. This can easily be accomplished with the String.Split method using the syntax below:

stringarray = mystring.split(“,” , StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)

Passing the quoted comma as the first parameter tells the Split method that a comma is the delimiter to look for in the string. Also, for even more control, the delimiter can consist of any number of characters.  There is no need to instantiate the dynamic array, as the dynamic array will automatically be instantiated by the Split method. The result of the above operation will be that the dynamic array stringarray will contain elements with the names that are separated by commas in the string mystring and no empty elements (due to passing StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries as the second parameter) for the commas with no values between them:

stringarray[1] = “Bob”
stringarray[2] = “Mary”
stringarray[3] = “Joe”
stringarray[4] = “Jack”
stringarray[5] = “Fred”
stringarray[6] = “Henry”
stringarray[7] = “Tom”

As you can see, the enhancements to the String class are more than enough reason to upgrade to Synergy/DE 11 when it’s released. If you can’t wait and want to try these new capabilities now, the version 11 beta is available in the Resource Center for download. Don’t forget to set your Synergy/DE documentation to the “Beta” version in the version drop-down near the top of the screen.

And wait, there’s more! Now that you’re aware of the new and powerful methods added to the String class, be sure to also check out the new StringBuilder class added to version 11.