Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

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

Removing Line Breaks/Carriage Return from Excel File

mariaabbott
5 - Atom

I am attempting to run a fuzzy match on some customer data and reduce the list to as few records as possible, as an employee will have to review the data and make decisions. I am encountering an issue where there are line breaks/carriage returns in my file, which is causing a number of duplicate records that have a match score of 0 because it's treating it like a separate unique value. It's not entirely apparent when looking at the data to know which records are duplicated because of this.

 

I am looking for a way to remove all line breaks/carriage returns from a singular column within my dataset. I have attempted to use the data cleansing tool to remove these line breaks, but it is not working. I have also tried using the text to columns and trim features in excel, but those did not work either. Are there any other suggestions on how I could do this within Alteryx?

 

mariaabbott_0-1669210514376.png

 

Thanks!

7 REPLIES 7
n8rushton
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

I would recommend regex. You can match all 'non printable' characters out of the standard ascii range with REGEX_Replace([Field1], '[^ -~]+', '') in a formula tool. If you want new line specifically it will be REGEX_Replace([Field1], '\n', '')

mariaabbott
5 - Atom

Hello! I attempted to do what you suggested but was unsuccessful. I am attaching a couple of samples of my data with the column name. Could you show me how this would work in a workflow?

n8rushton
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Not a problem. If you would like me to put the full workflow in here let me know.
n8rushton_0-1669217980970.png

 

DataNath
17 - Castor

Hey @mariaabbott, you can also just use a standard Replace() function here. For the target, literally just hit enter (a line break) inside your quotes:

 

Replace([DepotName], '
', '')

 

DataNath_0-1669218114485.png

mariaabbott
5 - Atom

Thank you both for the suggestions! I tried both of them on the sample data and it worked perfectly, but when I applied it to my actual data set it didn't remove the line breaks. I'll play around with it more and hopefully be able to determine some additional questions.

matador2501
7 - Meteor

#

cjaneczko
13 - Pulsar

You mentioned trying the Data Cleanse tool. Did you try the checkbox highlighted in yellow? 

 

image.png

Labels