It is not reasonable to parse individual values from Siebel 7 Web server responses, because the values appear in a condensed format. This makes it impossible to identify meaningful left boundaries for parsing functions, because such boundaries would include other dynamic information, e.g. a length specificiation of the value to be parsed or fragments of a previous value.
Therefore, Siebel 7 Web scripts include parsing functions for entire value arrays, and use tokenizing functions to retrieve individual values (tokens) from such parsed value arrays.
The formats of string representations of phone numbers, date values, time values and combined date/time values are different in server responses from client requests. This is because the Siebel Web client reformats values received from the server or entered by the user before they are sent back to the server in subsequent requests.
Without further provision, this makes it impossible to replace hard coded values in the script with parsed values, both for the Recorder and for manual script customization.
The reformatting functions mimic this client side reformatting, and thus allow to have these values in the script in the same format which is used in server responses. This makes it possible to replace these hared coded values with parsed values, both for the Recorder and for manuall script customization.