String Replace: Replace Formatting Classes doesn't work anymore

[mwiegand]

Hi there,

the once identified solution to deal with invisible aka formatting class characters presumably doesn’t work anymore. The solution was found in:

How to deal with unicode / special / invisible characters?

Hi @mwiegand Looking up this specific character, it falls into a class of unicode characters termed “Formatting”. I was recently investigating how to strip emoji and other characters from strings, and in the process discovered some quite useful info. In regex, there are a set of regex patterns describing unicode “classes” or “categories”. Once you know the class you wish to find or filter, you can then use these patterns. The pattern for this particular Formatting class is \p{Cf} , so if you …

I can’t exactly determine since when that is happening, though as I happen to notice it only now and invisible characters are quite … invisible but still cause processing issues (i.e. RegEx doesn’t match anymore to extract data).

Cheers
Mike

[takbb]

Hi @mwiegand , do you have another sample of data that is causing problems.

I suspect you have a unicode character belonging to a different “category”. Unfortunately there are a number of categories (as well as “formatting” ) containing “invisible” characters.

[mwiegand]

Hi @takbb,

this time it’s (I believe) a non-breaking space. Interestingly, when searching for \s in my favorite code editor like Sublime, these characters are matched but Knime refuses to do so.

It’s almost as Regex in Knime is not quite RegEx.

Edit: Stupid me, it apparently another character class. I thought it’s a reappearing issue, though. Using \p{Z} did result in a replacement. Closing the ticket.

Cheers
Mike