Tool Mastery | Find Replace

[MattD]

This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Find Replace Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer:

The Find Replace Tool is one of those tools that goes relatively unused and uncelebrated until you stumble into a data blending technique that would be extremely difficult without it – at which point, it becomes your favorite tool in the Designer. You can find it in the Join Category and it’ll make easy string substitutions in your data that would otherwise require a herculean effort to work around. Today, we celebrate Find Replace as a hero:

Find Replace to the rescue

• Make effortless HTML or ASCII substitutions (attached in Find Replace.yxzp):

• Use look up tables to standardize data (attached in Find Replace.yxzp):

• Simplify parsing with Find Replace

By now, you should have expert-level proficiency with the Find Replace Tool! If you can think of a use case we left out, feel free to use the comments section below! Consider yourself a Tool Master already? Let us know at community@alteryx.com if you’d like your creative tool uses to be featured in the Tool Mastery Series.

Stay tuned with our latest posts every Tool Tuesday by following Alteryx on Twitter! If you want to master all the Designer tools, consider subscribing for email notifications.

Additional Information
Click on the corresponding language link below to access this article in another language -
Portuguese
Spanish
French
German
Japanese

[deargle]

Your second figure shows the tool configured to replace with the filed Replacement, but this field is not present in the input data shown in the figure.

[RichoBsJ]

Hi @deargle, 'Replacement' field is the Text Input 'Lookup Table'.

Cheers!

[Lewis]

Why would the top line of the output not be '11 North Warren Circircle Lisbon Falls.....', as it should pick up the Cir in circle and change it circle?

Thanks

Lewis

[RichoBsJ]

Hi @Lewis,

actually, it would be Circlecle haha

I think the option 'Match Whole Word Only' was enabled in the configuration when they got those results, but it was disabled when they took the screenshot

Peace

Ricardo

[mhart]

does this work to replace a column header? In one of my existing workflows built, one of the columns names was "Department", and the source data has since changed from department to "Business Unit". 

Is there a way to rename every instance of the column name "Department" to "Business Unit"?

TIA!

[DfloDBDB]

You didn't discuss much about the Append part of find & replace

[HowardHan]

very helpful. do we have a tool to find and replace multi-fields? 

[Flo_G]

Just wanted to flag that the Lookup List attached in the workflow has a double entry for  

Not that it impacts the functioning of the tool, just saw that as I used the same list in my workflow and noticed the small issue 🙂

[khala1391]

thanks for good example

[Ashutosh]

onehelp ?

I am also trying to make screenshot like you did to capture some of the events in my workflow to document it.. can you help me how you did it

[Anelise]

thank you!

[LisaL]

@Ashutosh 

The images in the article are not off-the-shelf screenshots.  What he did to generate those was to take shots of the data as viewed in the Results windows of the respective tools, and then use Comment tools with those images as backgrounds.

 

[Ashutosh]

@LisaL -you are awesome.
Thanks for the help - I figured it out when I was making a not on Wordpad. then it clicked on my mind that I could take a screenshot and use it in the comment box as a background image.

And for the Line behind it - connector line: I was thinking about as well. Then gave a thought about it and came to the conclusion @MattD must have used the browse tool or any other tool to connect with it and moved it to Back before using the Comment tool.

[tasc4166]

How can we use the replace table to remove parentheses? I am unsure what replacement value I should input to recieve a blank space out of the replacement table.

[FláviaB]

Hi @tasc4166! I think you should post this questions in our Designer Discussions board for more visibility. 😉

[mvtejano]

This is good and thank you.

[srilakshmi123]

You didn't discuss much about the Append part of find & replace