
Tutorial: My first custom cleaner
Now that you have the basics and as you become more familiar with TextSoap, you may want to create your own customized cleaner, set to perform to your personal specifications and/or preferences.
We are going to create two basic example custom cleaners using TextSoap.
First we will define our need. For this example, we want to be able to take raw HTML text, capitalize everything, remove HTML tags and rewrap content text to 40 character.
- Create a new custom cleaner. Choose File -> New -> Custom Cleaner from the menu.
- We give the cleaner a name and a brief description.
- We click on the Actions Tab to show the actions we can use to create our custom cleaner
- From the Available Actions, select and drag the "Apply Cleaner" step to the work area.
- Choose "SCRUB" from the popup menu.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4, adding the "Convert to Uppercase" and "Extract Text from HTML Source".
- Now we drag a "Rewrap Text" step to the bottom of the work area and set the wrap amount to 40 characters.
- We save our custom cleaner. By default, TextSoap saves new custom cleaners to the appropriate folder.





Choose "Custom Cleaners" from the TextSoap application menu to see a list of all your custom cleaners.

You can select your custom cleaner here to later edit it if you so choose or you can open it from within the Finder.
To view and apply the custom cleaner, you can choose either the "Custom" group or the "Library" group (which includes all cleaners).

Although we try to make it as easy as possible, creating custom cleaners is not for everyone. One of the key new features in TextSoap 5 is the ability to share cleaners. Someone else can create a cleaner for you and you just need to open it with TextSoap 5 or drag it to the appropriate location. TextSoap will recognize you've added a new cleaner and include it in your list.