# String Operations

With the **String Operations** step, you can perform the following operations on an incoming PDI field:

* Trim (remove leading and/or trailing spaces).
* Convert to upper or lowercase.
* Pad (add leading or trailing extra characters).
* Convert to initial capitalization.
* Ignore escape characters.
* Remove or return only numeric digits.
* Remove special characters.

### Step name

* **Step name**: Specify the unique name of the String Operations step on the canvas. You can customize the name or leave it as the default.

### Fields to process

Use the **Fields to process** table to specify which operations you want to apply to your input strings.

| Column                       | Description                                                                                                                                                                                          |
| ---------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **In stream field**          | Name of the field containing the string to process. Select **Get fields** to populate the table from the incoming stream.                                                                            |
| **Out stream field**         | (Optional) A new output field containing the results of the string operations. If you do not specify a value, the step replaces **In stream field**.                                                 |
| **Trim type**                | Remove extra spaces from the left side, right side, or both. The default is none.                                                                                                                    |
| **Lower/Upper**              | Convert characters to lowercase or uppercase. The default is none.                                                                                                                                   |
| **Padding**                  | Add extra characters to the left side or right side. The default is none.                                                                                                                            |
| **Pad char**                 | The character added to the field for padding.                                                                                                                                                        |
| **Pad Length**               | The number of padding characters to add.                                                                                                                                                             |
| **InitCap**                  | Capitalize the initial character. The default is N.                                                                                                                                                  |
| **Escape**                   | <p>Use, ignore (escape), or process (unescape) the following formats if present in the field:</p><ul><li>XML</li><li>HTML</li><li>CDATA</li><li>SQL</li></ul><p>The default is None.</p>             |
| **Digits**                   | Return only or remove numeric digits. The default is none.                                                                                                                                           |
| **Remove Special character** | <p>Remove special characters:</p><ul><li>Carriage return (CR)</li><li>Line feed (LF)</li><li>Carriage return and line feed</li><li>Horizontal tab</li><li>Space</li></ul><p>The default is none.</p> |

### Metadata injection support

This step supports metadata injection. You can use it with [ETL metadata injection](/pdia-data-integration/pdi-transformation-steps-reference-overview/etl-metadata-injection.md) to pass metadata to your transformation at runtime.


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