chop helper

Tom Santiago

Updated September 22, 2025 18:43

Removes leading and trailing whitespace and special characters from a string. It is useful when cleaning up input values before using them in a flow.

Usage

{{chop value}}

Remove surrounding characters from labels

{{chop record.label1}}
{{chop record.label2}}
{{chop record.label3}}

Input:

{
  "record": {
    "label1": "_ABC_",
    "label2": "-ABC-",
    "label3": " ABC "
  }
}

Output:

ABC
ABC
ABC

Preserve interior punctuation, strip only edges, and avoid HTML escaping with {{{...}}}
```
{{{chop record.label}}}
```
Input
```
 { "record": { "label": " Hello*&^World- " } }
```
Output
```
 Hello*&^World
```

The helper removes spaces, underscores, dashes, and other non-alphanumeric characters at the start or end of the string.
It does not remove characters inside the string body. For example, "A_B_C" remains unchanged.
By default, Handlebars HTML-escapes the result. If you need raw output (for strings containing <, >, &, etc.), use {{{…}}}
Non-string inputs (datatypes such as number or boolean) are converted to strings before processing. Arrays of primitive types (like strings or numbers) are converted into a comma-separated string before processing. If inputs are objects or object arrays, the output will be unusable.