Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

How do I remove leading zeros from a field? Use the Formula Tool and the TrimLeft() function to remove leading zeros!

My journey with Regular Expressions (RegEx) started because I was lazy. In advanced use, being lazy or greedy is all part of the RegEx experience.

Troubleshooting the error: A Regular Expression was not specified.

The RegEx tool is kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of parsing in Alteryx; there are a whole lot of ways you can use it to do things faster or more effectively, but even if you just use the blade it's still immensely useful. Sometimes that's all you need, but if you do take the time to figure out how to use a few other tools in that knife, you'll start to see that there isn't much you can't do with it.

RegEx….it can be tough, but extremely useful when looking for ways of extracting information from a string. Regular Expressions are basically a code you can write to match a specific set of characters (it's a pattern matching syntax). It could be something as simple as finding the three-digit number in the string “Eample123Eample” or something more complicated like using hexadecimal to select a certain range of characters. RegEx is something that can be used in Alteryx via the RegEx tool in the Parse toolset and some of the main uses for RegEx are replacing, matching, and parsing specific characters within a string.

Between the RegEx, Text To Columns, and XML Parse Tools, the Alteryx data artisan already has an exceptionally robust selection of tools to help parse uniquely delimited data. However, there are still some data sets so entangled in formatting that it’s labor intensive to parse even for them. Enter the Find and Replace Tool, which captures the ability to find your nightmarish parsing workflows and replace them with sweet color by number pictures. Just kidding, it finds bad jokes and replaces them with good ones. Seriously, though, you could do both if you wanted to because this tool has the capability to look up a table of any number of specified targets to find in your data and will replace them with a table of specified sources. With the help of a few quick configuration steps, this tool can simplify some parsing use cases significantly.

This article features a workflow that will allow you to search for keywords within a column of text strings.

How do you convert a string with a $ sign into a number?

How to Trim Numbers with a RegEx formula

Use RegEx and build a Macro to Validate and sort IP Address.

How To: Change Date Type Coming Out of Date Interface Tool to Match In-DB Field Date

When running a workflow that uses a RegEx tool ahead of a Select Record tool, you receive different results with or without uding the Use AMP Engine.

12 Use Cases for RegEx

This article was put together to resolve a common issue with cleansing your data as well as to show the use of tools and techniques that are not normally used for newer users. The goal of the article is to get newer users into these tools to open their creativity with the tool and hopefully take you to the next level!   In this use case, the data in the attached workflow is messy with capitalized strings all over the place. We want to format the data by removing some of the capitalization, but not all of it.   Note: If we wanted to make every first letter of the word capitalized we can use the Formula Tool and the TitleCase(String) function. This would make BEAR the WEIGHT - Bear The Weight. See the difference?   Example:   The tools that we will be using in this exercise is the Record ID, Text to Columns, RegEx, Formula, Tile, and Cross Tab Tools.     The exercise will show you the importance of using the Record ID Tool. The flexibility of the Text to Columns and RegEx Tools, the under-used Tile Tool, the creativity of the Formula Tool, and the not so scary Cross Tab tool when then data is configured properly.   We hope that these exercise and use cases open up your mind and the greatness of Alteryx!   See attached workflow and enjoy!

A guide to RgEx syntax in Alteryx!