Identifying hidden special characters in a field

Question

Hi,

I have a requirement of identifying certain special set of characters which are allowed in a field, rest if  any other special character comes in the data field should be raised as a defect.

Please see the below set of data:

NameLENGTHResultLee4ErrorLinda6ErrorAd3ErrorLee3PassLinda5PassAd2Pass

My code is

if 
REGEX_MATCH(trim([FirstName]),'[A-Za-z0-9\.\·\`\,\,\ \-\ÀÈÌÒÙàèìòùÁÉÍÓÚÝáéíóúýÂÊÎÔÛâêîôûÃÑÕãñõÄËÏÖÜŸäëïöüŸ¡¿çÇŒœßØøÅåÆæÞþÐð]+') = 0

then 'F' 
else 'T' 
endif

The first three records are being raised a defect(coming from a systemic data), although i am unable to see any special character.

For testing purpose,I manually entered the names and they are getting passed, doing length check on those shows a difference.

Any help in identifying the root cause of this error and identify the special character so that i can pass that as well in the code.

Also any other perspective if i am missing, please let me know.

Thank you.

ChrisTX · Answer

It may be easier to specify the characters you want to keep, like a-z, A-Z, underscore, dash, 0-9, etc

Try the RegEx tool with Replace mode

Chris

JHAROHIT · Answer

Thank you, Chris.

That helps.

Using notepad++, i was able to identify there were some hidden special characters as below:

'? ' at beginning of name

Is there a way that i can get rid of these special characters ? I tried using the replace or contains function, but it is not able to catch them.

Appreciate your help.

Regardsm

Rohit Jha.

Special_Characters.PNG

ChrisTX · Answer

To get the ASCII or Unicode value for hidden characters, use a text editor like Notepad++

And/or you can use the Alteryx function CharToInt to get the Unicode number of the hidden character.   See Conversion Functions (alteryx.com)

CharToIntCharToInt(s): Returns the number that matches the input Unicode® character s.

Example* CharToInt("B") returns 66 (U+0042 'Latin Capital Letter B').

If you post a workflow or other file with hidden characters, I can provide an example.

Chris