Quotation marks in a text string

[Marc_Dillon]

In other languages, you can include quotation marks in a text string by surrounding the string with the opposite marking, i.e. single quotes around double quotes, or double quotes around single quotes. Appsheet does not seem to like this. I’m trying to use 6", as in “six inch”, in an expression. I’ve tried ‘6"’, text(6"), text(‘6"’), to no avail. Is Appsheet capable of handling this, and if so, how?

Specifically I’m trying to see if 6" is in a list of text items: IN( text(6") , [column])

[tony1 · Accepted solution]

AppSheet’s formulas try to follow the conventions set by Excel formulas. In this case, you can escape a double quote by doing a double double quote. Confused? Here’s an example:

IN("6""", [Column])

[Marc_Dillon]

Gotcha, thanks. Didn’t know that about Excel

[mustafa1]

what about json templates…
This function adds a backslash before “” double quote

[tony1]

@mustafa AppSheet will automatically escape quotes in your values in a JSON template. So if you do something like this:

{"text": "<<Some Column>>"}

and Some Column has the value "Hello," he said. it will be rendered as:

{"text": "\"Hello,\" he said."}

[Henjoe]

Hi,
I am having hard time wrapping my column values into double qoute:

I always get error on parsing it.
Looking for your help.

Thank you.

Regards,

[Marc_Dillon]

What exactly is the output you are hoping for here?

It looks like you might be trying to dynamically change the looked-up column based on a value in the current row. I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think you’ll be able to do this, as it won’t pass the expression assistant without an error, column names must be actual column names.

[Henjoe]

Thanks @Marc_Dillon ,

That’s exactly what I want. I want to dynamically past on the parameters on the LOOKUP function. If I did this, there we’re no errors as expected:

But that “Lopez Sugar Corporation” is in the Combobox [@ column Millers]. So basically, what I want is, based on the selected value on the combobox, I want to look up the value on the separate table. Will this be possible?

Regards,

[Marc_Dillon]

I believe you’ll have to explicitly specify each possiblity.

IFS(
  [Millers] = "X" , 
  LOOKUP(..., "X")
  [Millers] = "Y" , 
  LOOKUP(..., "Y")
)

[Henjoe]

Thanks for suggestion! @Marc_Dillon ,
I will try this and will get back here.

Regards,

[Henjoe]

It works well. However I need to hardcode it.
But atleast it works as expected.

Thanks for your help! @Marc_Dillon

[davidk]

“1\302\240\342\200\223\302\2405”

is “1 - 5”, where unicode em-dash and non-breaking spaces are expressed in octal.

When I have an appsheet webhook send:

“my_data” : “1\302\240\342\200\223\302\2405”

Am I right to think appsheet is escaping my backslashes? can i suppress that, so the \302 etc is received as octal?

[Marc_Dillon]

davidk:

Am I right to think appsheet is escaping my backslashes?

No, I don’t believe so. You should have no issue using blackslashes within a quoted text string.

[Steve]

Does JSON recognize octal escapes?

https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-escapes

[davidk]

ya. I’m having a challenge on the receiving side and don’t have visibility into where the stripping is happening, so I’m doing a few experiments.

[Kirk_Masden]

Hi @davidk !

I’m afraid I don’t fully understand your problem but I’m wondering if substituting some other character for the backslashes and then reconstituting the strings on the other end might be an option. Sorry if my idea isn’t applicable to your situation.