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.