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Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Designer Desktop experts.

Scientific Notation in the Text Input Tool

HossC
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Created
E Notation
Most people are familiar with the use of scientific notation, which provides a convenient way of representing very large number. This notation can be expressed in several ways, so that a number like 5,230,000,000 can be written as 5.23. Often this is condensed even further using the E notation (common in programming languages), so that 5,230,000,000 can be written as 5.23e9 or 5.23E9.
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D Notation
However, this notation can also be represented with a d or D instead of an e or E. The “D” notation is common to Fortran implementations and generally represents double precision numbers. This notation is much less common than the E notation, but Alteryx does recognize it.
Scientific  notation.png

Text Input Tool

So why is this important? It is worth keeping this in mind if you are working with strings such as Unique Identifiers or Address data. This may seem easy to spot (the picture above simply converts this notation into the decimal representation of the number). However, if the string were 4D-585 (That's 585 decimal places), as opposed to the 1D-003, the precision of that number would cause the Text Input Tool to hang up.

Comments
DawnR
8 - Asteroid

I'm stumped - I need users to be able to enter a string such as 87D-033, to be passed into an app to query a database. Of course, Alteryx, *helpfully* converts this to a number, which of course makes my app fail since it's meant to be a string. Any tips?

 

UPDATE: I fixed my own problem. In a nutshell, I used the formula tool to replace the text coming in from the user input rather than an action tool directly in the text input tool.

solution_scientific_notation.JPG

mvtejano
7 - Meteor

Interesting and very helpful. Thank you.