Find and replace across multiple columns

[ThomasVee]

I have a dataset with more than 20 columns. I`m using a two step workflow using Regex to find, replace and delete text after a certain character in each column. Is there any way I can do find and replace in one shot across all the columns?

[Thad Guidry]

Unfortunately no.  Open Refine does its operations against per column.

Someone created an enhancement issue to have that feature, but we never implemented it due to lack of time, funds, motivation.

Many of us however just use Google Sheets or even Unix tools to accomplish this task easily.  Google Sheets even supports Regex for that find replace across all sheets as well.  As with all free online tools, there's a limit for number of cells ... https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?visit_id=1-636268734143422044-2483090556&rd=1

-Thad

+ThadGuidry  

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 10:06 PM ThomasVee <thoma...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a dataset with more than 20 columns. I`m using a two step workflow using Regex to find, replace and delete text after a certain character in each column. Is there any way I can do find and replace in one shot across all the columns?

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[Thomas Vattakaven]

Thanks Thad,

I didnt realise you could do it in Google sheets. I Found an addin which allowed me to do this with excel called Regex Find and Replace.

I hope this feature will be implemented in Open Refine at some point in future.

Regards,

Thomas

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[Ettore Rizza]

Of course, a simple search & replace can be done in a spreadsheet - or even in a text editor if the file is a .csv. 

But what if you want to perform a more complex operation on each column of your project? Here is a little trick that use the "templating" function to reproduce a series of operations in Json format. In this case, the operation is "transform text to number" and, as you can see, it takes two minutes.

The screencast may seem a bit complicated, but it's always better than manually transforming over one hundred columns.

https://youtu.be/tkMk0Bk5zFg

[Thad Guidry]

Thomas,

I think some of the extensions developed for OpenRefine already do a global search/replace.

Perhaps others on the mailing list know which ones specifically.  I've forgotten.

Scroll down to the bottom half of this page to see the list we maintain of known extensions.

http://openrefine.org/download.html

-Thad

+ThadGuidry  

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[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Ettore

Possible short cut to getting the column names - rather than taking the file into Excel, you can use:

row.columnNames

Within a transform or custom text facet to get the list of column names

Owen

[Owen Stephens]

I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any extensions which do a global find/replace. If anyone does know one that does this please share!

Owen

[Ettore RIZZA]

Thanks Owen, I had forgotten that there was a colnames() method for rows. 

And I have never seen an extension that installed an "apply to each column" function. It's clearly in the Top 3 features for which I would be ready to pay a little bounty (the other two are: "create a new project from a faceted view" and "facet selected rows")

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