find & replace with 'special characters'

Question

Hi all,

I need to match internationally tables where the spelling is sometimes not exactly the same. Depending on the country, names are either written with ‘special characters’ or just with ‘normal letters’.

E.g. In table 1 Zoltán – table 2 Zoltan.

I need to append the department name from table 2 into table 1 (using find & replace tool).

Any idea how I could ‚fuzzy match’ to append data? Currently no match for these names with special characters.

ulrich_schumann · Accepted Answer

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the input and the additional examples form your link.

Based on suggestions, I came to the following solution:

1. Answer from @MarqueeCrew

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Remove-special-characters/td-p/40612

regex_replace([Field],"[^\sa-zA-Z]",'')

and removed all “special characters”

2. Compared the complete Names with the “reduced names” and listed all not matching columns

3. Extracted all “special characters” into a helping table and added the corresponding “normal letter”

4. With find&replace changes the special characters to normal characters base on

@JohnJPS

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Find-Replace-Remove-Special-Characters/td-p/79121

5. Special characters have been replaced with "normal characters" as expected.