Your First Cleaner

Tutorial

The best way to learn about custom cleaners is to jump in and create it. Let’s create a simple custom cleaner to fix any places where ‘TextSoap’ is not properly capitalized.

Create a new cleaner. From the customize navigator, select ‘+’ > New custom cleaner.

Give it a useful name. Let’s call it “Fix TextSoap Spellings”

When you create or open a custom cleaner, you are presented with a list of possible actions to use and a workspace area. The cleaner has a name, so you can begin by adding your desired actions.

In this example, you will need a “Find and Replace Text” action.

Double click “Find and Replace Text” item to add it to the action list. If you need to place it specifically within the list, you can also drag-n-drop it.

In the Find field, enter “TextSoap” In the Replace field, enter “TextSoap”

We can test the cleaner with some provided sample text. Select, copy and then paste the following paragraph into the clipboard workspace (or a new text document).

Sample text: Textsoap offers a collection of tools to automate tedious manual text changes. textSOAP can save you time and increase your productivity. Once people use textsoap, they quickly find it indispensable.

Select the Preview button on the top of the window to test your cleaner.

How This Cleaner Works

This is a nice example of a single action addressing a major problem. By default, the Find and Replace Text action ignores case with text matching. If you need to match text with case, remember to select the “Match Case” option.

In our case, “Textsoap”, “textSOAP” and “textsoap” will all match with the “textsoap” search. The action will then replace the found text with the correctly cased version “TextSoap”.

Congratulations! You have created your first custom cleaner. You can now use this custom cleaner just like any of the built-in cleaners.