I’ve been up since 5am because of the rollout today, so this post will be short and simple. Today’s letter comes from “R.” in Winterset, IA. He writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Some of my item titles are in ALL CAPS, but in my feeds I’d like to have “proper” or “title” casing, so that only the first letter of each word is capitalized. Let me guess: I need a regex, right?

That’s a good guess, R., but we actually have a function that does just what you want. It’s called PROPER. It takes in a text input, and outputs that text just as you said: all the letters are lower-case, except the first letter of each word, which is upper-case. Here’s what the R’s rule looks like:

PROPER($offername)

And here are some examples:

Now, nitpickers might point out that this isn’t technically title casing, because PROPER will capitalize conjunctions, articles, and prepositions (”and,” “the,” “of,” etc.). Well, they’re right. As a nitpicker myself, I sympathize. If it really bothers you, write to me and we’ll come up with a regular expression or something to fix it.

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I almost forgot to mention that I will be at Catalyst tomorrow—that’s Tuesday, April 1 (and this is not a joke, either). I’ll be at one of the roundtables, so drop by and say hello. I’ll only be there tomorrow, though.

See you!

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Time to follow up on my teaser post from last time. By the way, I found out that not everybody is aware that sometimes my posts are kind of long, so their complete text isn’t always on the main blog page. If you ever see a little bitty “(more…)” toward the end of the post, that means you need to click on the “(more…)” to read the full post. Today is no exception…(this is your cue to click on “(more…)”)
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First, a brief house-keeping note. I edited my last post, because I had a conversation with one of our users and I realized I had not made something clear: the arrays (which I called “lists”) that are passed to REDUCE are not at all the same thing as a ShoppingAdvisor Lookup List. You can’t use a Lookup List as one of the inputs to REDUCE at all.

I always strive to be as clear as I can with these posts. Clear writing about technical subjects is tricky, though. However, the good news is that this conversation I had was the genesis of a new function that is coming with the next release. I hate to keep writing these teaser posts, but I guess it’s better than only writing a post after every release, isn’t it? Here’s the full story…
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All right, I’m finally going to write that piece I’ve been promising everybody for the last couple of months. What I’m covering in this post applies mainly to ShoppingAdvisor accounts that have their inventory in MarketplaceAdvisor Premium and that have matrix (aka “parent/child”) inventory. Remember, this one is going to be kind of technical, unlike my usual posts.

Also, it’s REALLY long.
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