Text Change alternative to Find-and-Replace

[Anonymous]

I am working with (3) flat files which containg poorly formatted city names.  I am looking for the most appropriate solution to change, for example, sanfrancisco to San Francisco or sanjose to San Jose.

Typically, I would duplicate the column and do a find and replace.  Because this is 3 files, I was wondering if there was a more efficient way of doing this.

Thank you for your suggestions.

[BeemsC]

You can easily do this in the Query editor
Once you're in the Query editor, select your column -> right click -> Duplicate column
Then you select the duplicated column -> Go to transform(on the top of ur screen) -> Replace values -> Do this for every city

Good luck:)

[Anonymous]

@BeemsC

Thanks for the reply.  Couple of questions from this "newbie"

1.  I assume that I have to do this for each of the 3 files.  Correct?

2.  Do I do this for all cities, or just those poorly formatted?

3.  Why is transform, better than the search and replace?

Thanks!

[BeemsC]

1. I think you can use a paramater and only do it for 1, then use that for the others (I have no experience with this )

2. It's up to you, if you want clean data i'd format them all in the same way

3. In my opinion transforming in the query is a lot easier

[Anonymous]

@BeemsC

Thanks.  I like the approach of transforming the query.

That said, when you have the same shortcoming in mutliple foles, I would like to know if there is an opportunity to change once, and have it "ripple" across the mutliple files.

Any thoughts?