Filter only alphabetic values in tableau

Question

I have column in tableau with following values: 1234 3456 6789 camp-1 camp-2 camp-3

I only want to show filter with values camp-1 camp-2 camp-3

How can I only select the alphabetic values in filter in tableau?

Answer 1

Your example is not clear about what you want to include and what you want to exclude. To explain better, I took an elaborated example

Case-1 If you want to search/filter for digits at start, use this calculated field

REGEXP_MATCH([Field1], '^[0-9]')

Case-2 If you want to search for numbers anywhere, use this

REGEXP_MATCH([Field1], '(.*)[0-9]')

Case-3 If digits only are required

REGEXP_MATCH([Field1], '^[0-9]+$')

case-4 for alphabet at start use this

REGEXP_MATCH([Field1], '^[:alpha:]')

Results of all matches are shown below

Note Combining numbers anywhere AND alphabet at start you can filter out case1, case2 and case3 only.

Good Luck

Answer 2

If the Tableau column contains a mixture of numbers and text, the column will be a text column and all content will be considered as text. This reduces the problem to that of identifying specific rows that contain non-numeric values.

This requires some string manipulation and comparison. If you know that the structure of the content in those rows is predictable (eg the first character is always a letter when there are non numeric characters in the row) then a simple equation will filter on those rows:

if ascii(left([Text And Numbers],1) )>57 then 'text' else 'number' END

This exploits the observation that the ASCII decimal code for the digit 9 is 57 and most of the ASCII characters with higher codes are letters or punctuation (which is a fair assumption if nothing other than numbers, letters or punctuation are present in your data).

Obviously, if letters and numbers could appear anywhere in the string you need a more complex function but Tableau provides the option to use regular expressions which can code much more complex text analysis like is any alphabetic character present in a string (see this for some ideas of the appropriate regex expressions).