Concatenate¶

Concatenate columns as text or lists with optional separator as well as pre- and postfix.

If only a single input column is provided, even if it is a list, the result will be a text column by default.

If multiple columns are passed, and any of these contains lists, then the result is also a column of lists. In this case, each output list will contain the result of concatenating all elements in the corresponding row, whether these elements are themselves lists or not.

If none of the multiple input columns contains lists, the result will be a text column. Each input column will be converted to a string representation if necessary, and then concatenated with a given separator and pre- and/or postfix.

You can change this default behavior by explicitly setting an out_type in params.

Usage¶

The following are the step's expected inputs and outputs and their specific types.

Step signature

concatenate(*columns: column, {
    "param": value
}) -> (result: column)

where the object {"param": value} is optional in most cases and if present may contain any of the parameters described in the corresponding section below.

Example¶

The following example combines first names, last names and a title to create a new column with values in the form "Dr. first_name last_name":

Example call (in recipe editor)

concatenate(ds.first_name, ds.last_name, {
  "separator": " ",
  "prefix": "Dr. "
}) -> (ds.title_fullname)

More examples

Another example simply prefixes domain names of the form "twitter.com" or "google.com" to create URLs of the form "https://www.twitter.com" etc...

Example call (in recipe editor)

concatenate(ds.domain, {
  "separator": null,
  "prefix": "https://www."
}) -> (ds.full_url)

Inputs¶

*columns: column

One or more columns to concatenate.

Outputs¶

result: column

Column containing the result of the concatenation.

Parameters¶

separator: string | null

A separator to use between elements of individual columns when concatenating as texts.

prefix: string | null

A prefix to prepend to the result of the concatenation (or to a single column if no more were provided).

postfix: string | null

A postfix to append to the result of the concatenation (or to a single column if no more were provided).

nan_as: string | null = ""

How to represent missing values (NaN) in the concatenated result. If a "nan_as" value is specified, this will be used to fill in missing values during concatenation. With "nan_as": null the concatenation will produce a missing value in rows where at least 1 column to be concatenated had a missing value.

out_type: string | null

The semantic data type of the output column. Note, if this type is not compatible with the result of the concatenation, the output may consist of missing values (NaNs) only.

Must be one of: "category", "date", "number", "currency", "url", "boolean", "text", "list[category]", "list[date]", "list[number]", "list[currency]", "list[url]", "list[boolean]"