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.
SOLVED

A question about field types: v_string vs v_wstring

daniel_mmi
9 - Comet

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

6 REPLIES 6
RodL
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

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

daniel_mmi
9 - Comet

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."

 

 

RodL
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

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.

MacRo
Alteryx
Alteryx

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.

rohangadre
5 - Atom

Hi @RodL,@MacRo

 

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

Atabarezz
13 - Pulsar

Picture1.png

 

Labels