How can I count the lines of a custom field or the length of a list?

Nicolas Mezou

Hi,

I have a custom field, where we enter the names of all customers who are interested in a feature. This is great to see who to contact, before conceptualizing a new feature. But I would also like to get some quantitative insights about how many customers are interested. So I would like to count the line of the custom field. Currently, we use unordered lists:

• customer 1
• customer 2
• customer 3

If I could get the length of the list, or the count of lines I would directly receive the number of interested customers.

I tried a workaround by just using the `{{issue.Interested Customer.length}}` but it returns the length of the entire string which is not really representative.

Does anybody have an idea how to solve this.

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Nicolas Mezou  -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First thing: thanks for this question, as it helped me find a new defect in the automation rule conditions... Once a text field has been set, it cannot show as "is empty" ever again.  (I will submit a defect for that.)

On to your question... I did this counting by splitting the text and counting the new line characters.  Here is an example rule putting the customer list in Description and logging the results.

• Trigger: manual, or whatever you need
• If/Else, Advanced Condition: {{issue.description.length}} equals 0
  • Action: log that the count is zero
• Else, Advanced Condition:  {{issue.description.length}} is greater than 0
  • Action: log that line count is {{issue.description.split(".*\n").size}}

Note that when there is only one customer (one bullet), the count should still be correct even though there is no new-line character.  That seems to be a behavior of split() returning the unmatched string.

Best regards,

Bill