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I wasted a good old chunk of time dealing with non-breaking spaces, and Alteryx could be improved by handling this automatically.
A space is a space, right? Nope, there are spaces (ASCII value decimal 32) and there are non-breaking spaces (ASCII value decimal 160). They look the same, but have slightly different behaviour in certain circumstances, like when text is auto-wrapped.
The DataCleansing tool cleans spaces, but leaves non-breaking spaces.
The Data Grid puts a warning on cells with leading or trailing spaces, but remains silent for non-breaking spaces.
I was trying to match two strings, that looked identical. I had DataCleansed my cells, and the grid was showing me nothing wrong with the data. In desperation, I copied the two data cells that I expected to match to a text editor (Textpad), and then examined the binary ASCII values of the data. One cell had a trailing non-breaking space, and that caused the failure to match.
This was hard to find. For someone less hopelessly nerdy, it would be practically impossible.
As a small change, it might be really useful for Alteryx to include non-breaking spaces in it's definition of "space", such that DataCleansing tool removes it, and the Data Grid flags up the cell as having a leading or trailing space.
You could pick up non-breaking spaces from HTML, or from Excel. I think mine came from a SQL script but I am not sure how it was there. They are out there, and they will bite.
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