Text Replacement

Text replacement is a flexible way to automate text pre-processing before it can be parsed as expected. When you want to search and replace any string in the raw text, you can define a text replacement.

Note: Text replacement is unavailable to Text Parser and cannot be applied to retrieved sample text.

Text replacement can be defined in two levels:

• Global level: search and replace a string in the whole range of sample text.
• Parser level: search and replace a string in the given range of text that has been matched by a specific Parser’s definition.

Text Replacement Rules

When defining a text replacement, you can add multiple replacement rules. Each rule contains two objects as follows.

• Find What - the text you are searching for in the given range.

• Match Whole Word - once enabled, searches will only match if the result is a whole word, e.g., a search for “FastEthernet” will not return “FastEthernet1/2”.
• Match Case - once enabled, search terms are case-sensitive, e.g., a search for “ethernet” will not return “Ethernet”.
• Regular Expression - once enabled, search terms will use the regular expression engine to find complex patterns in the text; otherwise, search terms will be interpreted literally.

• Replace With - the text that will replace what is matched.

• Replace All Matches - replace all matches in the text scope.
• Replace First Only - replace the first match only.

Use Cases of Text Replacement

• Form a Table Header Line
  When a device command output looks similar to a standard table format but only misses a table header line, you can define text replacement to replace the line of text ahead of the table data with a customized table header line. This twist allows you to continue to define a Table Parser to parse the table data.
• Fill Up Table Headers
  When one or more table headers are missing in the sample text, using a Table Parser directly will lose the data of those columns.
• Rename Duplicate Table Header
  When there are two table headers with a duplicate name, the latter one cannot be parsed. As a workaround, rename table headers, so each header has a unique name. This can be done by replacing the line of table headers with a new one.
• Adjust table column width
  Sometimes the table headers are not aligned with data cells and cannot be parsed by a Table Parser. For example, the alignment gap between table headers and cells causes an incorrect parsed result.
• Translate Interface Name
  Sometimes interface names in the raw text are irregular and cannot be further used before manual processing.