# Cleaning answers

Get tidy data without asking people to retype anything. Formerie can trim, tidy, and standardize each answer before it's checked and stored.

The builder already trims spaces on common text fields and lowercases email
addresses. To go further, open a form, then **Processing**, and choose a field. It
works on text-like fields: short and long text, email, phone, URL, date, and dropdown.

Each field gets two ordered lists. Cleanup runs first, then transformations, each in
the order you set. Validation then checks the result, and that's the value stored and
delivered.

| Cleanup step | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| Trim spaces | Removes spaces at the start and end |
| Collapse repeated spaces | Turns any run of spaces and line breaks into one space |
| Standardize line breaks | Makes every line break the same |
| Remove tags | Removes anything written like an HTML tag |
| Remove links | Removes web addresses that start with `http://`, `https://`, or `www.` |
| Remove emoji | Removes emoji |
| Keep digits only | Keeps only the digits, on text and phone fields |

| Transformation | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| Uppercase, Lowercase | Changes the case of the whole answer |
| Replace values | Swaps one whole answer for another, such as `QC` for `Québec`. The answer must match exactly, and other answers stay as they are |

To try your steps, type a sample answer under **Preview**. It runs your unsaved steps
on Formerie's servers, with the same code as your live form, and stores nothing.

A field whose steps were set through the API shows them here. You can preview them,
and saving the form keeps them as they are.