Text type

In Hive, a text (often called “string” in other programming languages) must be surrounded with quotation marks (”). All the operations and functions described on this page work with literal texts, components, and variables alike:

var t = "Hello, ";
t.toUpper() + "world!".toUpper()   // returns "HELLO, WORLD!"

Formatted Text

Start and end your text with three quotes (”””) instead of one to create a formatted text. A formatted text can span over multiple lines (preserving each new line), you can use quotation marks without having to escape them and embed code fragments in it:

var answer = 42;
"""The answer is of course "{=answer}".
What else?"""

This will create a multi-line text:

The answer is of course "42".
What else?

If you want to use a quotation mark in a regular text, you must escape it with \. A regular text cannot contain line breaks either, instead requiring you to write \n.
The example above can be written as a regular text like this:

"The answer is of course \"" + answer + "\".\nWhat else?"

Not very convenient. Therefore, when you are dealing with text that contains quotation marks or line breaks, we recommend you use formatted text. However, there is one caveat: an opening curly brace ({) must be written as two curly braces in formatted text:

"""This is a curly {{brace}"""

This will create this text: This is a curly {brace}

Operations

Comparing Text

There is no case insensitive version of the <> operator, but you can negate the outcome of the ~= operator to achieve the same goal: not("up" ~= "UP") returns false for example.

Functions

length

Returns the number of characters in a text.

contains(text)

Returns true if a text contains a specific text.

toUpper

Returns a copy of the text with all characters converted to upper case.

toLower

Returns a copy of the text with all characters converted to lower case.

take(amount)

Returns a subset of a text that contains a specified number of characters.

• If a negative number is used, characters will be taken from the end of the text towards the beginning.

• If the number is greater than the number of characters in the text, the same text will be returned.

• If the number is zero, an empty text will be returned.

skip(amount)

Returns a text with a specified number of characters omitted.

• If a negative number is used, characters will be skipped from the end of the text toward the beginning.

• If the number is greater than the number of characters in the text, an empty text will be returned.

• If the number is zero, the same text will be returned.

Example: Imagine you wanted to extract 123 from an inventory number like ST-123-XYZ. The most straightforward way to accomplish this probably is inventoryNumber.skip(3).take(3).
But you could just as well write inventoryNumber.take(6).take(-3). The choice is yours!

replace(old, new)

Replaces all occurrences of a text with a different text.

• If the searched text isn't found, the function will return the original text

• All occurrences of the searched text will be replaced, not just the first one.

encodeHtml

Returns a text with all characters replaced that have special meaning in HTML, so that it can be safely used.
Note: while the text may look strange, your browser will still display it correctly.

decodeHtml

The opposite of EncodeHtml: converts an HTML-encoded text back to its original form.

encodeUrl

Similar to EncodeHtml, returns a text with all characters replaced that have special meaning in URLs, so that it can be safely used.

decodeUrl

The opposite of EncodeUrl: converts an URL-encoded text back to its original form.

encodeJson

Returns a text with all characters replaced that have special meaning in JSON – or that could pose a security risk via injection attacks. The returned text can be safely embedded in a JSON document.

Note: use this on a text that will be embedded in a JSON text, not on a text that contains JSON content itself!

toNumber

Converts a text to a number. If the text cannot be converted, for example because it contains non-numerical characters, Empty will be returned.

Always provide a fallback value in case the conversion fails. We made it easy to do so with the or operator.

toColor

Converts a text in hexadecimal color format to a color. If the color format is invalid, an error will be returned.

isBase64

Checks if the given text is a valid base64 string.