Find and Replace Special characters - Header

Question

Hi all! I am fairly new to Alteryx and I am looking to create a workflow to remove the special characters in the headers and replace them with underscore "_" without having to choose each field I want to complete the action above. I will have 10-20 different files that will have 3-8 different header fields that have a special character in them. I was hoping there is a way to create one workflow that would remove and replace without having to create 20 different workflows for each file that needs configuring.

Thank you in advance!! Love this community - I learn so much from these discussion boards.

Ladarthure · Answer

@Meghanyeager19 please find attached both methods I mentionned, you can be a lot more creative about it but I just made a simple version for example

renamming.yxmd

Meghanyeager19 · Answer

@Ladarthure Do you have an example flow of a mapping table? I think that might be the best way to do this! I used the dynamic rename tool but only one of the special characters I put into the expression would work for the output?

Ladarthure · Answer

@Meghanyeager19,

it depends a lot on what you consider a special character, for instance if you want to remove é by e you could use DecomposeUnicodeForMatch function which will replace those. If you want to remove all punctuation for instance, you could use a regex formula like this one (from data cleansing tool) :

REGEX_REPLACE([_CurrentField_],'[[:punct:]]|[\$\+<=>\^`\|~]','_') or

REGEX_Replace([test], '\W', '_') (which will replace all non words characters)

If you use the field info method, you could have a mapping table of all the the chars you want to replace and combine it with a find and replace tool for instance