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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It’s been nearly two months since my last post; my excuse is that we were super-busy with the Holiday season and with getting some new features out the door, as Max mentioned earlier. In my last post, I hinted at a new feature I was working on for ShoppingAdvisor. That’s going to be a huge post in itself, so today I’ll just briefly mention a new function that you can use to write business rules: REGEXGET.

Regular readers know some of the magic that a regular expression (or “regex”) can work, from our discussion of two other functions, REGEXREPLACE and REGEXMATCH. REGEXGET works a lot like REGEXMATCH: it has the same arguments—text and a regex. Instead of returning a true/false value, though, REGEXGET returns the part of the text that matches the regex. If I may plagiarize myself, I’ll re-use an example from before: (more…)

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I know I haven’t been writing very many posts these days, but my excuse is I’ve been hard at work on some sweet new features. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but I will give you a hint.

This week, “M.” in San Francisco, CA, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
My description field is too long for most of the comparison shopping engines. What should I do?

This is a pretty common problem, M. Most of the engines have some kind of limit on the length of every field you send. The description is the longest, of course, and most of the engines give you several thousand characters. Some, however, only give you a few hundred. How can you make sure your description data isn’t too long?
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As you read this, chances are that I’ve already reached my secure, undisclosed Thanksgiving holiday destination. I still haven’t finished packing, so I’ll try to make this post brief. This week, “R.” in Butler, MO, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
I’m trying to write a business rule that does certain things when my item’s brand attribute is “Acme.” I know I’m going to use an IF function, but I’m struggling with writing the condition part. There are several ways to look for “Acme” in a field; what’s The Best Way?

Well, “R,” it really depends on the possible variations of “Acme” that you might have. Let me give you some guidelines:

1. If it’s always “Acme” and just “Acme,” then you can just use an equal sign: $brand="Acme"
2. If the “Acme” text could be surrounded by some other text, like “The Acme Company,” then you can use CONTAINS: CONTAINS($brand,"Acme")
3. If the “Acme” text could have some other characters sprinkled through it, like “Ac-me,” then you probably should use a regular expression: REGEXMATCH($brand,"Ac-?me")

One final note: ALL of those methods are case sensitive. If it’s possible that you might sometimes have “ACME,” you could try converting your brand to all lower-case and then using one of the three methods, like this:

1. TOLOWER($brand)=”acme”
2. CONTAINS(TOLOWER($brand),”acme”)
3. REGEXMATCH(TOLOWER($brand),”ac-?me”)

Don’t forget to change your comparison strings to all lower-case, too!

That’s all for now. And also, even though the year is winding down, we’re busier than ever in the Code Factory, so I’m afraid I probably won’t get very many more posts up before 2008. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

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Sorry that it’s been so long since my last post, but I do have a day job, you know. Here’s this week’s question, from “S.” in Piscataway, NJ.

Dear Feed Doctor,
I notice in a lot of your posts you have functions inside of functions. Can I do that with any function?

Well, S., the answer is: Yes. Mostly.
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