Parsing
Data Management's pattern tools are textual parsing tools designed to identify structured data within free-form text fields from sources like:
Catalogs
Inventories
Contact records with combined name/address/phone fields
You can perform simple pattern-matching using the Regex tool.
A more structured pattern-matching process might look something like this:
The Token Creation tool parses text input into components or tokens.
The Symbol Creation tool compares the tokens to a set of regular expressions and assigns descriptive symbols to the tokens.
The Pattern Match tool analyzes groups of symbols and re-classifies each token according to its position within a matched pattern, defined using Data Management's Symbolic Regular Expression language. The Pattern Match tool includes a pattern analyzer and Symbol Sets to help you classify symbols sequences correctly.
The Pattern Assembler tool reassembles the parsed data into the desired structured form.
Because the pattern tools group the tokens by record, it is assumed that the incoming records have a unique ID field, which can be used by downstream tools to reassemble records. If your data does not have a unique ID field, we recommend that you create one using the Generate Sequence tool for the subsequent pattern tools to use.
In this section: