Remove URL Encoding

[Sean Leahy]

Hi,

I have a column in my project that has a lot of URL encoding that I would like to remove. If I perform a single replace, that particular encoded character is replaced as expected. i.e.
replace(value, "%26", "&")
But given there are so many characters I would like to handle them all in one transform statement and not do each different type of character one at a time. 

I have also tried the following but it is not recursive.

if (value.contains('%20'),replace(value, "%20", " "),
if (value.contains('%21'),replace(value, "%21", "!"),
if (value.contains('%22'),replace(value, "%22", "\""),
if (value.contains('%23'),replace(value, "%23", "#"),
if (value.contains('%24'),replace(value, "%24", "$"),
if (value.contains('%25'),replace(value, "%25", "%"),
if (value.contains('%26'),replace(value, "%26", "&"),
if (value.contains('%27'),replace(value, "%27", "'"),
if (value.contains('%28'),replace(value, "%28", "("),
if (value.contains('%29'),replace(value, "%29", ")"),
if (value.contains('%2A'),replace(value, "%2A", "*"),
if (value.contains('%2B'),replace(value, "%2B", "+"),
if (value.contains('%2C'),replace(value, "%2C", ","),
if (value.contains('%2D'),replace(value, "%2D", "-"),
if (value.contains('%2E'),replace(value, "%2E", "."),
if (value.contains('%2F'),replace(value, "%2F", "/"), value)))))))))))))))))

How can I make this recursive ? so they are all processed in one GREL transform statement, or is there a function for this in GREL?

Thanks,

slahy

[Tom Morris]

The "if" is implicit and you can chain functions, so you could just do

  value.replace("%20", " ").replace("%21", "!") ...

but even that is more work than you need to do since we have 

  value.unescape("url")

That function will also handle html, xml, csv, and javascript escaping (with the appropriate mode parameter).

Tom

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[Sean Leahy]

Well that is much simpler, thanks Tom.

Is there documentation for these functions just to see what else is available ?

[Tom Morris]

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Sean Leahy <sle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there documentation for these functions just to see what else is available ?

The Help tab in the Transform dialog has a complete list.  There is additional documentation available on the wiki at  https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki (which is linked to from our main site at http://openrefine.org/documentation.html

Tom

[Tom Morris]

p.s. unescape(value,"url") and value.unescape("url") are synonyms, so you can choose whichever style is most comfortable/familiar for you, but the latter style works much better for chaining multiple functions together.

Tom