In CRM fields, text rarely sits in the form you need: an address as a single line instead of city and street, a comma-separated list of items, a lead description with HTML markup from an email. The stock business process actions in Bitrix24 insert a field's value whole — there's nothing to cut it up, join it with another, or clean it. Four robots cover the basic string operations: split by a delimiter, join values with a delimiter, cut out a substring, strip HTML tags.
Why does a business process need string operations?
The typical situations. An address "Moscow, Tverskaya, 1" came in from a form — for segmentation you only need the city. A notification needs to assemble the name, amount, and source of a deal into one line. A company name from an import starts with "www." or a prefix that interferes with search and spoils documents. A lead was created from an email — markup tags are left in the description. The business process designer can insert the values of fields and variables into text, but not transform them: it can't split by a delimiter, cut out a fragment, or clean the markup. Each operation below is one robot with one action, and they combine freely into a chain with one another.
How do you split a string by a delimiter?
The Split a string by a delimiter robot takes the source string and a delimiter — a comma, a semicolon, a space, any character or combination of characters. The output: the parts of the string as a multiple value, and their count. The string "Moscow, Tverskaya, 1" split by the delimiter "comma plus space" gives three parts: the city, the street, and the building. The parts are written to a multiple process variable or to separate fields — for example, the city goes to its own field for filters and reports. The count of parts comes in handy in a condition: if the address split into fewer than three parts, the format is unexpected, and the card is better shown to a manager than filled in blindly.
How do you join values into a single string?
The reverse operation. The Join values with a delimiter robot takes a multiple list of values, a delimiter, and a "skip empty values" option. The output is a single string. The typical case: assemble a readable deal name or notification text from the city, source, and rate plan — "Moscow · website · Pro". The skip-empty option solves the perennial problem with such joins: if a lead's rate plan isn't filled in, without it you'd get "Moscow · website · " with a dangling delimiter at the end, and with it a tidy string of two parts. The result is written to the deal name, a comment, or the text of a notification to the manager.
How do you cut out a substring from text?
The Cut a string robot removes all occurrences of a given substring from the source string. Input: the source string and the fragment to cut; output: the result. Examples: remove "www." from a website address before writing it to a field, cut the "Sole Proprietor" prefix from a company name for documents, remove a service note from an email subject before creating a task. Keep in mind "all occurrences": if the fragment appears in the string three times, all three are removed — there's no partial mode. For more complex replacements — by a pattern, with groups and conditions — there's a regular-expression formatting robot; here the most common case is covered: remove a known fragment without patterns.
How do you strip HTML tags from text?
A lead was created from an email or a form — the description has paragraph, line-break, and link tags. You can't paste such text into a document, an SMS, or a task. The Strip HTML tags from text robot removes all tags from the string, collapses the extra spaces left behind, and, optionally, decodes HTML entities — encoded ampersands, quotes, and non-breaking spaces become ordinary characters. Input: the source string and the decoding option; output: cleaned text. The recipe: a process for creating a lead from email runs the description through the robot and writes the clean text into a comment — the manager reads the email without markup, and document templates get normal text with no tag fragments.
In summary
Four robots — four operations: Split a string by a delimiter, Join values with a delimiter, Cut a string, Strip HTML tags from text. Each does one thing and combines with the rest: split the address, take the city, join the deal name. All are in the text robots catalog and install for free from the Bitrix24.Market. If the string operation you need is missing — describe the task and we'll build the robot for free and add it to the shared library.