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First of all, let me just say that support for variable-width strings is on my '10 Things I Love about Alteryx'. Having just escaped from a FoxPro environment, I love the intuitive ways Alteryx deals with field sizes.
One wonkish question, though: what's the difference between v_string and v_wstring fields? Clearly the 'w' stands for 'wide', so there's probably a degree of optimization, but is there a max size for v_string fields, or something like that?
Thanks,
-D
Solved! Go to Solution.
Daniel,
Alteryx had a pretty good documentation in Help.
For that question, try...
http://help.alteryx.com/10.0/index.htm#Reference/DataFieldType.htm?Highlight=data types
I think it will cover most of what you are looking for.
Rod
The only difference I see seems to refer to support for unicode characters. Is that it?
V_String: "If the string greater than 16 characters and varies in length from value to value."
V_WString: "If the string greater than 16 characters and varies in length from value to value. If the string contains unicode and is longer than 16 characters, use V_WString, such as a "Notes" or "Address" field."
I believe that's the difference...since with String and WString, they both have limits of 8192 characters. You use the WString if containing Unicode.
Since V_WStrings support unicode, they require more bytes per character than V_Strings, so if you know that the data doesn't contain unicode characters, my understanding is that you should see a bit better/faster performance by using V_String instead.
Is there a way to auto-convert 'V_String' types to 'V_WString' type? I'm using 'Auto-Field' tool which enforces Text types as 'V_String' & this is resulting in loss of few special characters.
A possible solution is to use 'yxft' files (as suggested here) but this adds external dependency.
Thanks!
-Rohan