Remove the beginning and ending white spaces in a whole column

[Mauricio Salazar]

Hi there, I want to remove the beginning and ending white spaces in a particular column, I was using Edit Cells/Transform/value.trim().

But when I check some of the cells I see that some of the cells still have a blank space at the beginning. I wonder if there is another way to do that.

Thanks in advance 

[Tom Morris]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 5:51 AM, Mauricio Salazar <mauu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi there, I want to remove the beginning and ending white spaces in a particular column, I was using Edit Cells/Transform/value.trim().

But when I check some of the cells I see that some of the cells still have a blank space at the beginning. I wonder if there is another way to do that.

What character(s) is/are being left behind?  If it is something that trim() doesn't deal with, you can get rid of it using replace('<char>','').  I don't remember off the top of my head whether it deals with NonBreak Space, Zero Width Space, and all the other weird space characters (it should if it doesn't).

Tom 

[Thad Guidry]

No, trim() does not.  We had plans to add an additional parameter to say trim(mystring, all) which would remove all types of whitespace.  I did have a Closure quick script around that does it in one line...but forgot where I put it... bah...

You can do what I documented in the Quick Recipe instead however... (modify to suit the type of whitespace that is found after you do a unicode(value))

https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Recipes#question-marks--showing-in-your-data

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[Thad Guidry]

Forgot to mention, another way that I sometimes do it is to create a new column based off your column with the custom expression:

value.escape("javascript")

which will show all the weird space characters you have and then you can use split() or chomp() or whatever method to cut them out in mass..

[Owen Stephens]

Also worth looking at the 'Recipes' on the OpenRefine wiki

https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Recipes

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if you have non-breaking spaces &nbsp on both ends then you might try this instead:

  split(escape(value,'xml')," ")[0]

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