Problem

[evelyne24 at gmail.com]

Hello all,
I wrote a post on xwiki-users this morning, because someone told me there is where the questions about "how to" are supposed to go, but nobody answered (and I  figured it out by myself, with the help of Sergiu) so I'll try my luck here, as I really need some help. 
In a velocity script I receive a request and I take the value with #set($input =$request.get("param")).
My question is, how can I apply string transformations (i.e to lowercase, split the string etc) to this variable($input) in velocity? I looked everywhere but I guess I miss something. Please help!
Thank you,
Evelina Slatineanu