CloverDX Blog on Data Integration

Hidden Features: Using Multiple Delimiters for Parsing Data

Written by Petr Uher | August 18, 2009

CloverDX provides a very useful feature: multiple delimiters. When you parse a delimited file (eg. CSV) you can specify different delimiter for each field. This isn't surprising for daily CloverDX users however for users of other ETL tools it can be. It might not be very well known that in CloverDX you can even define multiple delimiters for one field (also called "mutable delimiter") and CloverDX chooses the right one. It reveals new ways of file processing with irregular structure in CloverDX. I believe this functionality isn't provided by any other ETL tool on the market. If I am wrong you can leave me a message in comments. I'm always happy to find "hidden features" of other ETL tools.

Syntax of a mutable delimiters: delimiters have to be separated by '\|'. For example if you want to define that field delimiter can be ';' or ',' or '#' you have to write ';\|,\|#'.
The simple example of using a mutable delimiter you can download here as a zipped CloverDX project. The import of existing CloverDX project to your CloverDX Designer is described in CloverDX documentation.