Get Inspire insights from former attendees in our AMA discussion thread on Inspire Buzz. ACEs and other community members are on call all week to answer!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Maintaining Special Characters in Column Header via Transpose

TravisJWhite
7 - Meteor

Hi All,

 

I'm having issues with the Cross Tab function removing special characters from the cells that I want to use as my column headers downstream.

 

Is there any way to prevent that tool from removing special characters when it creates the new column names? I was thinking that maybe there were some sort of dummy characters that I could put before/after to act as a buffer, but no success as of yet.

 

Cheers,

 

Travis

6 REPLIES 6
MarqueeCrew
20 - Arcturus
20 - Arcturus

I've seen that with cross tab, but not with transpose.  Can you provide some sample data to help us help you?

 

Cheers,

Mark

Alteryx ACE & Top Community Contributor

Chaos reigns within. Repent, reflect and restart. Order shall return.
Please Subscribe to my youTube channel.
TravisJWhite
7 - Meteor

Hey There,

 

Sorry - I included the incorrect tool name - it is, in fact, Cross Tab. Edited with correct tool name.

 

Any solutions for Cross Tab?

 

Ex: % CY HHs Families with Related Children < 18 Yrs  --> ___CY_HHs_Families_with_Related_Children___18_Yrs_

 

MarqueeCrew
20 - Arcturus
20 - Arcturus

@TravisJWhite,

 

With that edit, this makes more sense to me.  What I would suggest is that you create a set of replacements for what will become the header data.

 

BAD, GOOD

Field_1, Field 1

My_Field, My+Field

 

You can use an expression like Regex_Replace([Field],"[^a-zA-Z0-9]",'_') to emulate the crosstab.

 

This table of fieldnames can be used in a DYNAMIC RENAME tool that will exchange any BAD field names for the GOOD ones.

 

Cheers,

Mark

Alteryx ACE & Top Community Contributor

Chaos reigns within. Repent, reflect and restart. Order shall return.
Please Subscribe to my youTube channel.
TravisJWhite
7 - Meteor

Thanks Mark!

 

I was able to truncate the original list using the Data Cleansing tool, then add Dynamic Rename to replace those just before the output downstream. 

adityag539
5 - Atom

Hey Travis, 

Can you provide your solution?
I am stuck with a similar problem

w_chivers
7 - Meteor

Thanks MarqueeCrew, worked a treat. 

 

I've attached an example to this post for anyone looking at it in the future.

Labels