CloverETL provides a very useful feature: mutable delimiter. When you parse a delimited file (eg. CSV) you can specify different delimiter for each field. This isn’t surprising for daily CloverETL users however for users of other ETL tools it can be. It might not be very well known that in CloverETL you can even define more delimiters for one field (so called “mutable delimiter”) and CloverETL chooses the right one. It reveals new ways of file processing with irregular structure in CloverETL. I believe this functionality isn’t provided by any other ETL tool on the market. If I am wrong you can leave me a message in comments. I’m always happy to find “hidden features” of other ETL tools.
Syntax of a mutable delimiter: delimiters have to be separated by ‘\\|‘. For example if you want to define that field delimiter can be ‘;‘ or ‘,‘ or ‘#‘ you have to write ‘;\\|,\\|#‘.
The simple example of using a mutable delimiter you can download here as a zipped CloverETL project. The import of existing CloverETL project to your CloverETL Designer is described in CloverETL documentation.


