Using the Marcedit capturing group Find/Replace in Open Refine, pt.2 : putting it into an if function.

This is a continuation from this post about how to mimic Marcedit capturing group Find/Replace in Open Refine.

The one problem with mimicking the Marcedit Find/Replace is that it will wipe out the data you don't want to alter unless you facet it out first. This is kind of cumbersome and still doesn't have the convenience of Marcedit's Find/Replace.

However, the if function takes care of that problem. I'm going to post the recipe here at the top and then go into detail further down. So, for your capturing group find of value.match(/<capturing group regex>/), do a transform cells, and drop it into this statement:

if(isNotNull(value.match(/<your find>/)), <your replace>, value)

How to do a Marcedit Find/Replace with capturing groups in Open Refine

One of the things that's really frustrated me with Open Refine is that there didn't seem to be a way to mimic the capturing group rearranging from the Find/Replace function in Marcedit.

For example, in this import of Marcedit records, some of the subfield a's have an indicator in front of them:

Click on image to enlarge

In Marcedit, I'd normally do this:

click on image to enlarge

But I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Open Refine. value.match seemed like a contender, but I couldn't figure out how to access the array elements. I finally figured it out today --