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Junaid11's avatar
Junaid11
Helper V
4 years ago
Solved

Special Character in Column Name

Hello, I have few columns which have special characters in them. I tried creating a custom column based on column with special character in its name but it did not allow me to do that in Power query...
Need Help
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    4 years ago

    [#"Work?"] instead of [Work?] will work.

     

    --Nate

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
4 years ago

[#"Work?"] instead of [Work?] will work.

 

--Nate

  • King7son1's avatar
    King7son1
    Frequent Visitor
    1 year ago
    Kudos  to Mark from Excel off the grid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3lTPggW2yc
     
    you can create a function to clean up special characters from column names like this
    In my case I had a main table with nexted tables that i wanted to clean up before combining so you called my function by 
    Table.TransformColumns(Source,{"Data", each Table.TransformColumnNames(_,CleanHeaders)})
     
     // Custom function to replace special characters and spaces with an underscore
    let
        ReplaceSpecialCharacters = (inputText as text) as text =>
        let
            // Define the characters to replace
            specialCharacters = {".", ",", "!", "@", "#", "$", "%", "^", "&", "*", "(", ")", "-", "_", "=", "+", "[", "]", "{", "}", "|", "\", ":", ";", "'", "<", ">", "?", "/"," " },
            // Replace each special character with an underscore
            replaceUnderscore = List.Accumulate(specialCharacters, inputText, (state, current) => Text.Replace(state, current, "_"))
        in
            replaceUnderscore
    in
        ReplaceSpecialCharacters