DB Edit String Fields

Edit button on Table view, which provides popup.  Only enabled if you check the "EDIT" box on the right of the row of buttons, since all changes are permanent (save a copy of the database if you are concerned about editing mistakes).

• Trim blanks: removes leading or trailing blanks, which can make filtering the database difficult. This should not be required, but moving files between programs can leave unwanted blanks.
  • one field
  • all string fields
• Trim length all string fields: some databases have excessively long lengths for string fields.  This option will find the longest length in each field, and rewrite the database to use this length for the field.  This allows you to see many more fields in the table display, without have to manually resize the fields every time you open the database, or to hide the fields.  This may limit merging of shape files, since one reason for excess field lengths is that other data bases for adjacent areas might have longer strings in the field.  You can do this for a single field by Double clicking on its field name.
• Add leading zeros:
• Remove leading zeros: pick a field, and a desired length, and leading zeros will be appended.  This can repair a field like a Zip code that has been treated as an integer, and thus cannot be used for join/link databases.  
• Remove non-numeric entries
• Fix Excel dates:  if you have fields like "2-3", Excel will turn them into "3-FEB".   This will turn them back into the numerical form.  This is really for things like heights ("5-9").
• Add integer code: adds a field, and computes an integer code for each unique string in a string field.  The codes will run from 1 to the number of unique values, and will be in alphabetical order.
• Translate from table
• Add record ID field: will add a string field, which will have an optional ID string, followed by a number from 1 to the number of records.
• Extract file name: remove the path, and leave just the file name.  This allows you to move the database and files to another computer.
• Count of records with substring: gives a count of the number of records that contain the substring in each DB field of type.
• Mask based on substring present in any string field for the record

Last revision 10/31/2019