Fill down the right and secure way

The fill down function consists of taking the content of cells and copying down following blank cells. This is done based on the rows number. When you perform this action using the fill down function, Google refine does not take into account if rows belong to different records or not, if the following rows are blank, it will fill it down with the content of the previous row.

If you do not use this function with extra care you can easily corrupt the integrity of your data set. In a nutshell use  row.record.cells[columnName].value[0]   to fill down data within the same record. 

Here is why, and how to avoid that.

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Selecting a string within a cell using smartSplit

The function smartSplit is a variation on split function that allow you to split the cell content based on any string of character and then select the leg you want to work on. This function is very useful to extract or remove string within cells without creating multiple columns and then merging them back.

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Count how often a character occurs in a cell

Did you know that Refine can count how often an string or character appears in a cell?

To achieve this, I first recommend that you store the count result in a separate column (so you do not write over your initial content). Select your reference column (where you want to do the count per cells) and create a new column based on this column. An other option is to store the result in a custom text facet.

We will use the Grel expression value.split(" ").length().

However if the cells does not contains the value Refine will still return '1'. I found two ways to work around this issue.

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How to: convert easting/northing into lat/long for an interactive map

How to: convert easting/northing into lat/long for an interactive map 

Google Fusion Tables is great for creating interactive maps from a spreadsheet – but it isn't too keen on easting and northing. That can be a problem as many government and local authority datasets use easting and northing to describe the geographical position of things – for example, speed ...

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Merging Datasets with Common Columns in Google Refine

Merging Datasets with Common Columns in Google Refine

It's an often encountered situation, but one that can be a pain to address – merging data from two sources around a common column. Here's a way of doing it in Google Refine…Here are a couple of example datasets to import into separate Google Refine projects if you want to play along, both courtesy ...

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Remove all number from a string

To remove all digits value from a string the following regex should do the work (from the menu edit cell > transform):

replace(value, /\d/, '')

This expression replace all numbers (identified by the regular expression /\d/) by blank. 

All regular expression (regex) in google refine should starts and ends by the character: /

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Delete multiple projects at once (using the explorer)

At the end of a large project, you may have created multiple of google refine projects and want to clear them from the Open Project view. Screenshot (click on picture to enlarge it) below are from google refine 2.5. The same process is applicable to previous version, only the button browse workspace directory changed is place.

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