Adobe plug-in: cleanStr

IMPORTANT

This plug-in is provided by Adobe Consulting as a courtesy to help you get more value out of Adobe Analytics. Adobe Customer Care does not provide support with this plug-in, including installation or troubleshooting. If you require help with this plug-in, contact your organization’s Account Manager. They can arrange a meeting with a consultant for assistance.

The cleanStr plug-in removes or replaces all unnecessary characters from a string, including HTML tag characters, extra whitespaces, tabs, and newline/carriage returns. It also replaces left/right single quotes ( and ) with straight single quotes ('). Adobe recommends using this plug-in if you want to remove unnecessary characters from variable values and the ‘Clean text’ feature in Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection does not fulfill your implementation needs. This plug-in is not necessary if the collected data does not contain unnecessary characters, or if the ‘Clean text’ feature in Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection is sufficient.

Install the plug-in using custom code editor

If you do not want to use the plug-in extension, you can use the custom code editor.

  1. Log in to Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection using your AdobeID credentials.
  2. Click on the desired property.
  3. Go to the Extensions tab, then click the Configure button under the Adobe Analytics extension.
  4. Expand the Configure tracking using custom code accordion, which reveals the Open Editor button.
  5. Open the custom code editor and paste the plug-in code provided below into the edit window.
  6. Save and publish the changes to the Analytics extension.

Install the plug-in using AppMeasurement

Copy and paste the following code anywhere in the AppMeasurement file after the Analytics tracking object is instantiated (using s_gi). Preserving comments and version numbers of the code in your implementation helps Adobe with troubleshooting any potential issues.

/******************************************* BEGIN CODE TO DEPLOY *******************************************/
/* Adobe Consulting Plugin: cleanStr v2.0 (No Prerequisites Required) */
function cleanStr(str){var a=str;if("-v"===a)return{plugin:"cleanStr",version:"2.0"};a:{if("undefined"!==typeof window.s_c_il){var b=0;for(var c;b<window.s_c_il.length;b++)if(c=window.s_c_il[b],c._c&&"s_c"===c._c){b=c;break a}}b=void 0}"undefined"!==typeof b&&(b.contextData.cleanStr="2.0");if("string"===typeof a){a=a.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g,"");a=a.trim();a=a.replace(/[\u2018\u2019\u201A]/g,"'");a=a.replace(/\t+/g,"");for(a=a.replace(/[\n\r]/g," ");-1<a.indexOf("  ");)a=a.replace(/\s\s/g," ");return a}return""}
/******************************************** END CODE TO DEPLOY ********************************************/

Use the plug-in

The cleanStr function uses the following arguments:

  • str (required, string): The value that you want to clean HTML encoding, extra whitespace, tabs, or other unnecessary characters.

The function returns the value of the str argument with all unnecessary characters removed.

Examples

// Returns the value "this is a messystring". Note that both tabs and extra spaces are present in the original string.
// Multiple spaces are reduced to one, while tabs are omitted entirely.
s.eVar1 = "  this  is a      messy  string    ";
s.eVar1 = cleanStr(s.eVar1)

// This function call does not do anything because the code does not assign the returned value to a variable.
s.eVar1 = "  this  is a      messy  string    ";
cleanStr(s.eVar1);

Version History

2.0 (March 19, 2021)

  • Added version number as context data.

1.0 (April 15, 2018)

  • Initial release.

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