A plain In PhixFlow, a text expression is made up from a string of characters inside double quotes, along with escape characters to allow for special characters to be used. It evaluates insert special characters, for example quotes and line breaks. It can also include variable elements so that data from streams or other PhixFlow objects can be inserted into the string. The expression must evaluate to a fixed string (an actual human readable string).
This page describes the syntax for string literal expressions in PhixFlow.
All expressions in PhixFlow are written in the PhixFlow scripting language, //and every expression resolves to one of the following:
- A regular expresion, following the POSIX style
- A string literal expression
Regular expressions are used for text pattern-matching, whereas plain text expressions can be used both to do literal character matching and provide output values. In simple terms, writing a plain text expression for a string valued field on a stream would result in a (that) string being output to the database, but a regular expression would have no meaning in this context.
Examples:
If you want the string abc"def..
Examples
| Required output | Text Expression |
|---|---|
| Completed | "Completed" |
| abc"def | Use single quotes if you want to embed a double quote (or visa versa) |
...
'abc"def' or prefix the quote with a backslash |
...
...
"abc\"def" |
...
Note how this contrasts to the |
...
Regular Expression case, where a double-backslash is used to escape special characters. | |
The account number ACC46242 failed | Generate a message including the current account number being processed, which is provided by _out.accountNumber: "The account number " + _out.accountNumber + " failed" |
This message is finished. | "This message\n" + "is finished." |