I was recently re-watching my Power BI Mixtape: Vol. 1 presentation and recalled a question from the audience as I was going through one of my Power Query demos. They suggested that I could update my solution to split a column by a line feed special character – and they were correct! I have outlined my previous approach to the demo in this post here:
As a quick recap, in this example I connected to an online data source and my goal was to have a simple table with three columns:
- FSA
- City
- Location within the city
The source data was in a matrix format, with data repeated across rows and columns in a table. Within each cell, there were three “levels” of information that correspond to the three columns I want in my clean table.
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Starting from the matrix, with repeated cells across columns and rows, I first consolidated all of the information I needed into a single column. Then I removed the other columns. This left me with a single column of data – each row containing three lines of information that I wanted to split into columns.
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At this point, in my previous solution, I removed the line feeds so that all of the information in each cell was on a single line. I then had to rely on a few different patterns to correctly split my data into three columns.
The solution worked, but it was a bit complicated and there were a few edge cases to account for.
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To simplify my transformation, rather than using the Text.Clean
function to remove the line feeds within each cell and THEN starting to try and split the strings, I leveraged these line feeds to split the column.
I started by splitting the source column by the first line feed "#(lf)"
character. This gave me my first clean column for the forward sortation area.
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I repeated this process to finalize the two additional columns that I needed: the city and a description.
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Finally, I used the Text.Clean
function to remove any remaining line feeds.
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This got me to the same tidy data source for my report, but with transformation steps that were easier to read, audit, and maintain.