☐ cool new feature ☑ could help many users! ☑ removes a „bug“ ☐ nice to have ☐ nobody needs it Is there a column colname in my data table? This is one of the questions which are asked most often in the community: https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/Check-column-name-if-existing/m-p/312011/highlight/true#M56... https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/How-to-check-if-list-of-columns-exist-and-report-those-that... https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/If-column-exists/td-p/348 https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/how-to-creat-new-column-if-same-name-column-does-not-exist/... https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/Create-a-new-Row-column-only-if-it-does-not-exist/td-p/3091... https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/Determining-if-a-column-exists/m-p/6268#M6267 https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/Validate-column-name-exists-before-graphing/m-p/5088#M5087 So, it seems that it's not straightforward enough, how it is implemented at the moment. But it is even more interesting - and bears a lot of dangers. A user who doesn't know about the stumbling blocks associated with JSL naming conventions, most probably just writes Contains( dt << Get Column Names(String), "age" ) into his code. Quite easy ... but extremely dangerous - see: https://community.jmp.com/t5/Discussions/check-if-column-exists/m-p/572468 What looks like strange discussions of some jsl scripting nerds shows that the above statement, sure, will work for many cases, but: will fail once spaces, capital letters, special character are in the column names. To prevent users from using such dangerous code, it's the best to "instutionalize" - i.e. provide the users an easy solution which accounts automatically for all pitfalls. My wish: it should be possible to ask a data table: dt << contains column("colname") This function can account for all pitfalls: - compare with exact match - or check match for as name("colname"), accounting for spaces - distinguish or don't distinguish lower/capital letters - handle special characters The benefit: - less questions in the community - automatically better code. - less frustration. more wishes submitted by
... View more