Spotfire® User Guide

Using text filters

The text filter is used to filter to values that match an entered text string.

About this task



Type a text string in the field.

In the installed client, as you type, the visualization is continuously updated with the values that begin with the current substring. In the web client you must press Enter to perform the filtering.

Only rows with values matching the text string remain in the visualization. Below you find tips on how to search for wanted values:

  • The text filter is not case-sensitive.
  • A blank space between two search words will result in rows containing both words.
  • Search for june OR may to find rows containing either of those months.
  • Use *son to search for rows ending in "son" (Anderson, Jamesson, etc.), and use *sun* to search for rows containing the letters "sun" somewhere (Sunday, Asunder, and so on).
  • Use quotation marks "sample batch alpha" to search for explicit phrases.
  • Non-alphanumeric characters are not considered to be included in words, and if no quotation marks are used, matching is done on word boundaries. Add quotation marks to include special characters in the search string.
  • Searching Date, Time and DateTime: When searching for date or time, always search using the same formatting as shown in the visualization. The separators between year, month, day will be treated as word separators.

    For example, suppose dates are shown in a table visualization in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

    Searching for 05 would match dates such as: 2005-05-27 or 1998-12-05.

    Searching for *05 would match dates such as: 2005-12-30 or 1997-05-22 or 1879-10-05.

    Searching for 04-2 would match dates such as: 1998-04-21 or 2005-04-29.

    Time can sometimes be shown using a colon, for example: 11:45pm or 23:45.

    The colon is a protected keyword, which means that to search for such a time you must enclose the time within quotation marks: "23:45". Just searching for 23:45 without the quotation marks will not give any matches.

  • Searching Currency: Depending on how a column of currency values is presented, it can have various symbols before or after the digits. When searching, do not enter these symbols, just search for the value. For example, searching for 550 would find $550, £550 or 500kr.

Example

Assume you have a data column with all the months of the year, that is, January, February, March, ..., and December. Below you can see which values remain after typing different text strings.
Entered in text filter Filtered rows
j January, June, July
ju June, July
jun June
june June

See also Searching in Spotfire clients for more information about search expressions.