# New 'Format as text' expression on lists

**URL:** <https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898>\
**Category:** Meta\
**Created:** [November 19, 2020, 8:02pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898 "2020-11-19T20:02:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![luke2](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/luke2/32/256674_2.png) [@luke2](https://forum.bubble.io/u/luke2)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2020, 8:02pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/1 "2020-11-19T20:02:14Z")

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![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/d/c/dce84d77cf693fe25cffb6635e39c55723fe4ab7.png)

![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/e/7/e7c93780790f27b1ac0dcbebc2c37f14e11692e1.png)

Reference here, but a little vague could do with a few more use cases please

> **[Introduction](https://manual.bubble.io/)**
>
> Welcome to the Bubble Docs.

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**Author:** ![lottemint.md](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/lottemint.md/32/26549_2.png) [@lottemint.md](https://forum.bubble.io/u/lottemint.md)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2020, 8:25pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/2 "2020-11-19T20:25:50Z")

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Oh, man. That’s such a cool update!

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**Author:** ![lottemint.md](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/lottemint.md/32/26549_2.png) [@lottemint.md](https://forum.bubble.io/u/lottemint.md)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2020, 8:31pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/3 "2020-11-19T20:31:23Z")

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![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/6/9/69c4d3a432f306ca9dbf13db5a13fc23a6d898b0.png)  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/0/3/0368fb6af4e025bd38f54ec1dd7f32f7cd9363e2.png)

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**Author:** ![austin3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@austin3](https://forum.bubble.io/u/austin3)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2020, 8:40pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/4 "2020-11-19T20:40:07Z")

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This is fantastic news. Generating text summaries of invoices used to be a major pain (e.g. trying to get “QUANTITYx PRODUCTNAME”) displayed properly with each item on a new line.

To make sure, does the delimiter support “line\_break” like the concatenation function does? Or can we just input a newline and it will work?

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**Author:** ![luke2](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/luke2/32/256674_2.png) [@luke2](https://forum.bubble.io/u/luke2)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 12:07pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/5 "2020-11-20T12:07:50Z")

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Very useful for APIs

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![luke2](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/luke2/32/256674_2.png) [@luke2](https://forum.bubble.io/u/luke2)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 12:12pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/6 "2020-11-20T12:12:37Z")

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Yeah handy in generating a concatenated output of a data type and say using that data in an email for line items, the ability to keep looping with the ‘`This [data type]`’ and keep working on the same item to generate the string is really useful.

![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/4/0/40c0f1a8048207e7a35136bfa3a2fb0bbf7f3967.png)  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/a/f/afc2843e4ac237341317dbae7545a110d54c83a5.png)

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**Author:** ![w.fly](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/w.fly/32/26894_2.png) [@w.fly](https://forum.bubble.io/u/w.fly)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 4:02pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/7 "2020-11-20T16:02:45Z")

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This is incredibly powerful as it allows you to “iterate” on each item in a list. I just used this to create a subtotal of a shopping cart I have in a RG [Take the RG list, **for each** , take quantity \* price]. Previously, I was forced to use plugins to grab data within the RG.

Keep the list functionality comin!

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**Author:** ![renatoasse](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/renatoasse/32/93895_2.png) [@renatoasse](https://forum.bubble.io/u/renatoasse)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 9:12pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/8 "2020-11-20T21:12:12Z")

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Wow, that is a great feature. Can’t believe Bubble was so quiet about this 😅

I’m building a plugin to issue fiscal invoices, and a major problem was to send an array of items into the JSON body. With this feature, it’s now solved!

Thank you for bringing this to light, @luke2

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**Author:** ![w.fly](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/w.fly/32/26894_2.png) [@w.fly](https://forum.bubble.io/u/w.fly)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 9:20pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/9 "2020-11-20T21:20:43Z")

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Agreed - @Bubble I’ve used this about 50 times today for all sorts of things… Incredible feature. 🙂

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**Author:** ![vini\_brito](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/vini_brito/32/22187_2.png) [@vini\_brito](https://forum.bubble.io/u/vini_brito)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/10 "2020-11-20T22:50:59Z")

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For whoever is still wondering this is awesome to reach out to an external API that requires you to build a JSON text body with a variable amount of items.

So let’s say they want you to send a name.  
You’d send this text:

```auto
{
    name: "Vini"
    }

```

By wrapping it like this

```auto
{
    name: "Selected Humans's name"
}

```

But what if you want to send as many humans as there are in your database? You can’t type that statically.  
So you use this feature and wrap it like this:

```auto
{
    name: "This Humans's name"
}

```

So if you pass a list with three Humans, it will be like this:

```auto
{
    name: "Vini"
},
{
    name: "Renato"
},
{
    name: "Luke"
},

```

Now you can safely pass as many Humans as you want.  
Note that we already could do this, it was just tougher and often required plugins.  
There are other use cases too, wrapping texts and building JSON bodies for external APIs is just one that has crossed my mind.

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**Author:** ![eli](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/eli/32/42610_2.png) [@eli](https://forum.bubble.io/u/eli)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 7:32pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/11 "2020-11-21T19:32:00Z")

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Whoa! This is huge! Amazing for sending data to an API but also opens a host of possibilities for calculations as well.

@nnich19, how we could have used this recently!

![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/f/0/f0b0f65729c66b73f75c2a1fa2480f77dac78e46.png)

![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/b/a/ba16cbc8cffbbd1d3f484a626dcaff4215505be8.png)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![eli](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/eli/32/42610_2.png) [@eli](https://forum.bubble.io/u/eli)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 7:50pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/12 "2020-11-21T19:50:30Z")

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Easy HTML tables in emails  
Dynamic CSS on pages  
Export CSV Files with the CSV Creator plugin and include any calculated values that are possible to display in an RG

… Just a few offhand uses for this.

@bubble should be making a big deal about this!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![lottemint.md](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/lottemint.md/32/26549_2.png) [@lottemint.md](https://forum.bubble.io/u/lottemint.md)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 8:05pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/13 "2020-11-21T20:05:49Z")

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One thing is we still should JSON stringify text content that has special characters.

Not a valid JSON due to double quotes and new line:

```
{
 "first_name": "John",
 "last_name": "Connor",
 "description": "John Connor is a fictional major character in the "Terminator" franchise.
 Skynet ..."
}
```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![eve](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/eve/32/48346_2.png) [@eve](https://forum.bubble.io/u/eve)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 8:36pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/14 "2020-11-21T20:36:08Z")

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Hey folks – super glad to see that you’ve noticed this and are enjoying the feature! We’ve kept it a bit quiet to make sure that we can address any bug reports promptly as they happen – a feature like this can be tricky to release! – so please do ping us if you see something unexpected. Otherwise, please enjoy! 😃

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![lottemint.md](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/lottemint.md/32/26549_2.png) [@lottemint.md](https://forum.bubble.io/u/lottemint.md)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 10:45pm UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/15 "2020-11-21T22:45:17Z")

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This is a truly great update.  
Now, we don’t need to use or build custom plugins to achieve specific goals. So, it saves time.  
But, as an additional operator, it would be great if you can provide JSON stringify:  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/original/3X/f/7/f702596c297d585f3094f12260a696162762f636.png)

In short, it helps to prepare HTML templates, JSON objects for the API connector, etc.

Thanks!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christophe\_HK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d78d45/32.png) [@Christophe\_HK](https://forum.bubble.io/u/Christophe_HK)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2020, 2:50am UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/16 "2020-11-22T02:50:36Z")

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This feature is amazing!

I’ve noticed a bug : if the delimiter is empty, it’s replaced by “, null”

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![fayewatson](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/fayewatson/32/2686_2.png) [@fayewatson](https://forum.bubble.io/u/fayewatson)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2020, 5:21am UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/17 "2020-11-22T05:21:20Z")

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Incredible!! 🎊 ✨ **Huge thanks** to the @Bubble team for this! Can’t wait to use it!

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**Author:** ![petter](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/petter/32/98626_2.png) [@petter](https://forum.bubble.io/u/petter)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2020, 5:29am UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/18 "2020-11-22T05:29:22Z")

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Pretty damn awesome 🙏 🤖

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![sharma.himanshu0608](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/sharma.himanshu0608/32/81321_2.png) [@sharma.himanshu0608](https://forum.bubble.io/u/sharma.himanshu0608)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2020, 8:42am UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/19 "2020-11-22T08:42:04Z")

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What is the delimiter for a line break?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![BrianHenderson](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/bubble/user_avatar/forum.bubble.io/brianhenderson/32/231409_2.png) [@BrianHenderson](https://forum.bubble.io/u/BrianHenderson)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2020, 9:22am UTC](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898/20 "2020-11-22T09:22:20Z")

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@luke2 Thank you so much for pointing this new feature out! I had to do some crazy workarounds using the List Item Expression plugin (or was that part of the Toolkit plugin?) and loads of JavaScript to get what I needed for my app, and now I can replace it all with something so simple and elegant and natively Bubble. I’m over the moon right now. This was a desperately needed feature.

[Next page](https://forum.bubble.io/t/new-format-as-text-expression-on-lists/121898.md?page=2)