Case insensitive join

[SeanAdams]

Hey all,

The join tool currently does not allow case-insensitive joins, but the find/replace tool does.    Additionally- even if both sides are identical, the join tool will not join "Sean's house" to "Sean's house" because of the non-letter character in the middle.    Finally - if one side is a string(2), and the other is a vString(200) - even if you have a single identical character on both sides you get uncertain outcomes unless you force the type

Please could you consider amending the join tool to include 3 new options or capabilities:

- Case insensitive join

- Allow full Unicode character set in join

- Full match across text types (irrespective of string size) - this would allow a string(2) value to match to a string(100) value as long as the string(100) value only has the same 2 characters in it as the string(2) value

That would remove a load of work from every text-join that's being done on every canvas we do.

Thank you 

Sean

[zoesaleh]

Here is a case study of why this is needed.

 Left join:

Course name	Number of students
MSc in Economics & Maths	50
MSc in Economics and Maths	50
MSc in Economics And Maths	50

I then export this and group them together to create a mapping table (using Tableau which is not case sensitive and gives me this mapping table (right join):

Course name	Clean course name
MSc in Economics and Maths	MSc in Economics & Maths
MSc in Economics & Maths	MSc in Economics & Maths

Inner join output using join on course name: 

Clean course name	Number of students
MSc in Economics & Maths	100

So I loose the 50 students from the left table because of the capital A in 'And'. Once I've done some manual checks I realise this issue and have to add this to my mapping table. 

Using the find replace tool or using a formula to do mapping is not an option as I have hundreds of course names to map. If I convert everything to lower case I loose the capitalisation which I need.

If anyone has any suggestions to make this less painful in the absence of the insensitive join please let me know. 

Thanks,

Zoe

[DataMeister]

Sean: Yes, it wouldn't take much to toggle case sensitivity on & off--Alteryx is full of toggles! But seriously, the comments here are shockingly unrealistic. In a busy knowledge-work environment where engineers need datasets fast, nobody wants to spend time fussing with upper & lowercase shenanigans when there's an app for that. And don't get me started about how Alteryx needs to stop with the fussy date-handling!

[hroderick-thr]

How I'd like it done...

[marco_zara]

If there is a risk of compromising functionality this might be part of a "fuzzy join" tool, which could definitely be another popular addition.

[AshRez]

7 years and counting, maybe we can get this feature after another 70 years. 😜