Recipe 4 – applying a text filter
In this recipe, you will learn about filters that allow you to search for values displaying some patterns.
When you want to find rows matching a certain string, it is easier to rely on a simple text filter than on cumbersome facets. Let's start with a simple example. Suppose you want to filter all titles relating to the United States. Navigate to Object Title | Text filter and watch the filter box open on the left, in the same tab where facets appear. Now type in USA
. OpenRefine tells you that there are 1,866 matching rows. Select the case sensitive checkbox to eliminate happenstance matches, such as karakusa and Jerusalem, and we are down to 1,737 rows:
Still, we cannot be sure that there is no noise left in these matches; there could be occurrences of JERUSALEM in capital letters for instance. To get around this problem, we could try to add spaces to either side of USA, but at the risk of losing cases, such as [USA] or /USA, along with occurrences of the...