Strip all punctuation from a text input

[davidstone]

I'm trying to allow my users to paste whole paragraphs of text into a text box, which I then need to parse without any punctuation. I'm happy with the parsing, but not sure of the best way to remove punctuation.

Looking at the Substitute function, and thinking back to my InfoPath days, it doesn't let you replace characters by position. So for example I can't list all the characters I want to remove and 'replace' them with a blank string.

I guess I could nest a bunch of substitutes as below, but this feels inefficient.

Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(TextInput1.Text, ".", ""), ",", ""), ";", ""), etc.....

Any thoughts?

[Mike8 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You can check this:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Expressions-and-Formulas/Remove-special-characters-from-string/m...

[davidstone · Accepted solution]

Instant solution!

In case anyone finds this, save yourself a hop with the following:-

Concat(Filter(Split(TextInput1.Text,""),IsMatch(Result, "^[a-zA-Z0-9]*$")),Result)

[DevinFlickinger]

@davidstone VERY HAPPY you shared it here, because hopping over to that other page led to: Access Denied - You do not have sufficient privileges for this resource or its parent to perform this action.

Not sure why that page is dead/inaccessible

[Daniel_Nugoz]

Hi David,

I'm quite new to the PowerApp universe (building my first app for a customer). I want to apply this to a field where truck drivers are supposed to enter their registration number in a text field (called "DataCardValue16.txt). Where exactly would I use the following Concat function?

Concat(Filter(Split(DataCardValue16.Text,""),IsMatch(Result, "^[A-Z0-9]*$")),Result)

Do I paste it in the update field of the DataCard itself?

[DevinFlickinger]

I would put it on the OnChange hook of the input field itself, so after they change the field and defocus it, it will fire your function and remove special characters