Checking regularity across months

shusband

Hi Alteryx experts,

I have a set of data with revenue spread across months. I need to validate whether the revenue is straight line, be that monthly, quarterly, bi-monthly etc. There needs to be a way to check whether any row has irregular breaks in when revenue will be posted.

I've put together the attached printscreen to show what would be considered OK, what is not OK.

The screenshot assumes a 12 month duration for each row, however this will not be the case in reality. Rows could end at any point in the year, the revenue just needs to be regular for the duration of the contract.

I'd highly appreciate your help here.

Regards, Stephen

Screenshot 2026-03-30 141915.png

DavidP

Hi @shusband 

This is an interesting pattern matching problem where we are looking for a repeating pattern. If we concatenate your months into one, the pattern looks like this:

RecordID	Concat_Value
1	111111111111
2	100100100100
3	10101010101
4	10011001010
5	110101011011

Rows 1,2 and 3 show a repeating pattern, hence they're ok.

You can use a Regular Expression to identify repeating patterns, like this:

^(.+)\1+$

</code></p><p data-path-to-node="5"><strong data-index-in-node="0" data-path-to-node="5">How it works:</strong></p><ul data-path-to-node="6"><li><p data-path-to-node="6,0,0"><code data-index-in-node="0" data-path-to-node="6,0,0">^ : Starts at the beginning of the string.

(.+) : Matches any sequence of characters and captures it as Group 1.

\1+ : Matches the exact same sequence found in Group 1, one or more times.

$ : Ensures the pattern repeats perfectly until the end of the string.

repeating pattern matching.yxmd