An Alteryx App to tidy up messy country names

[jamielaird]

I was recently (yesterday) given a large data set containing more than 2,000 extremely messy manually typed countries which I needed to convert into standardized country names in order to analyse.

The issues range from:

• typos, e.g. "Chaina", "United State", "emirates A.U.",
• non-English spellings, e.g. "estados unidos", "etats-uni", and, best of all,
• locations not even being countries: "London", "TOULOUSE", "IDAHO", "North America los angeles".

After ranting a bit about drop-down lists being a good idea in future, I put together a simple Alteryx App that uses the Google Maps Geocoding API to return a tidy country name and ISO 2-letter code for every value provided.

It works better than I'd expected - only one of the above examples fooled it - is lightning quick, and generally a time-saver so I thought I'd share it in case anyone else would find it useful.

All you need to do is create an API key at https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/start

[Aletorresa]

Hi jamie; I am getting the following error; 

Do you know what might be the problem ?