Find and Replace with List <-> Process List [Find and Replace]

[Julien]

Hi,

While reading the documentation, I notice this Note :
"Note: For more advanced functionality, you can use the Process List action. And for best results, don’t use Find and Replace with List within a Process List group."

The part I'm more worried about is the second sentence, as I have a few cleaners built this way, and some cleaners using other cleaners. 

1. What do you mean by "For best results" ?   How will the result be impacted in my cleaners ?

2. What is the difference between :

Define list + Process List (Find and Replace)

and

Define list + Find and Replace with List ?

[Julien]

Also,

what does this paragraph means ?  (from the Documentation)

[Mark Munz]

When I created the Process List command, I imagined it might be used for additional processing of some sort. And I think the documentation here may be confusing.

In practice, I found that when I used Process List, it only included the single Find/Replace action. And it seemed silly to make users add two actions all the time for the most common use-case. That is why I re-instated Find & Replace with List.

The warning is not about mixing the two within the same cleaner, but just understanding that Find & Replace with List is trying to operate on a list as well.

For example, in this setup here, if both First List and Second List have 4 rows :

Because it is inside a Process List, each of the 4 rows in "First List" are iterated through, calling the actions, including the Find and Replace with List for each row (this action then runs through each of the 4 rows in Second List). The result is 4 x 4 rows or 16 find and replace actions applied instead of 4. That's almost certainly not what you want.

If anyone can think of some additional use cases where Process List might prove more useful, please let me know.

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[Mark Munz]

Also note that $v{col:A} and $v{A} are equivalent. I decided to just reserve a single-letter indicator for columns in variables. For now, $v{col:A} is treated the same as $v{A} and I may just add that transformation when importing in the future.

$v{..} is the beginning of variables within custom cleaners. I hope to flesh that out more in the next major release. Variables are trickier when you're not defining a whole language, but rather UI actions.

To find "$v{A}" within TextSoap, you just need to escape the $, so find "\$v{A}" will be treated as plain text and not a variable indicator.

Either a typo on my part or the markdown translation somehow skipped over the backslash in the documentation.

[Julien]

Thank you for this explanation, I do understand better now. Your support is extremely appreciated !

To reply to your inquiry about other uses of the process list :

I do use the process list also for formatting options, where, for example, I bold titles when it is a list of titles.