The removefirst helper removes the first occurrence of a specified substring from a string, leaving all later occurrences unchanged. Use it to strip a known prefix or leading marker from a field value.
Syntax
{{removefirst str substring}}
str -- The input string. Required.
substring -- The substring to remove. Required. Matching is case-sensitive: "A" and "a" are treated as different values.
Examples
Remove the first occurrence of a character
{{removefirst record.text "a"}}
Input:
{ "record": { "text": "a b a b a b" } }
Output: b a b a b
The first "a" is removed. The remaining two instances are preserved.
Remove the first occurrence of a word
{{removefirst record.note "Order"}}
Input:
{ "record": { "note": "Order Order Order" } }
Output: Order Order
Only the first "Order" is removed. Note that the removal leaves a leading space -- trim the output if needed.
Usage notes
- Only the first match is removed. All subsequent occurrences remain unchanged.
- Matching is case-sensitive:
"Order"and"order"are treated as different substrings. - Removing a substring may leave a leading or internal space. Use a trim helper to clean up whitespace if needed.
- To remove all occurrences instead, use
{{regexReplace field "" "substring" "g"}}.