In this recipe, you will learn how to use OpenRefine's built-in transformations to modify subsets of your data.
When playing with facets and filters, we have essentially displayed the data in various ways, but we have not really affected them. Now comes the time to modify your data at last, and this means entering the powerful Edit cells menu. While we already used Blank down in order to detect duplicates, other transformations, such as splitting and joining multi-valued cells or clustering and editing values, are more advanced, so we will delay their discussion until the next chapter. Other transforms are easier to grasp; however, we will focus now on those available through the Common transforms submenu pictured in the following screenshot:
Trimming whitespace at the beginning and end of a string is a good first step to improve the quality of your data. It will ensure that their identical values will not differ by leading and trailing whitespace...