What is data manipulation?
Data manipulation is the process of editing, structuring, formatting, or sorting data to facilitate its usage and improve its management capabilities.
Strings
If you have experience with any other programming language, you will notice that the methods and properties offered by UiPath are very similar to them. When it comes to Strings, there is a wide variety of options to work with, and we can basically move the string around as we need.
The following list contains the most common and popular String functions in UiPath. However, the options available are not limited to these.
Split
Substring
Replace
Remove
Trim
TrimStart
TrimEnd
ToUpper
ToLower
ToArray
PadLeft
PadRight
Length
Contains
Lists
Lists are data structures of objects of the same data type, for example a list of strings (List<String>). Each object has a fixed position in the list which means it can be accessed by an Index. Lists allow us to Add, Insert, and Remove items from it.
Some of the specific methods of manipulation are:
Adding and removing items.
Searching for an element.
Looping through the items.
Sorting.
Extracting items and converting them to other data types.
Datetime
The DateTime type (System.DateTime) allows you to store information about dates and times in variables.
Some of the most common functions and properties are:
Add
AddDays
AddHours
AddYears
Date
Day
DayOfWeek
Hours
ToString
Dictionaries
Dictionaries are collections of key and value pairs (Dictionary<TKey, TValue>), in which the keys are unique. The data types for both keys and values have to be chosen when the variable is declared. For example, Dictionary<String, String> where the first String could be a name, and the second one a date of birth.
The operations that are most often associated with Dictionaries are:
Adding and deleting (key, value) pairs.
Retrieving the value associated with a key.
Re-assigning new values to existing keys.
RegEx Builder
A regular expression is a pattern that the regular expression engine attempts to match in input text. Usually, it is a complex expression and it requires some technical background to understand and build such expressions.
However, UiPath has introduced a tool called RegEx Builder that provides us with an user friendly interface that allows anyone to create their own expression with just a few clicks.
In the following video I'll walk you through the UiPath RegEx Builder, how it works, and use cases where you can use it.
For more details about all the properties and methods of each of these datatypes you can refer to the official UiPath documentation https://docs.uipath.com/studio/docs.