Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiters function for Power BI and Power Query

While there is a native function to fetch text between 2 delimiters in Power Query, there is no such function that removes the text instead. Therefore I’ve created a custom function Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiter. It even lets you choose to remove the delimiters themselves as well via the optional 4th parameter..

The code

How to use

The Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiters – function has 3 mandatory parameters and an optional one:

  • Text itself (as text)
  • first delimiter (as text, can contain multiple characters)
  • second delimiter (as text, again can contain multiple characters)
  • optional string: If any value is entered here, the delimiters themselves will be eliminated as well

Use cases

  • Delete HTML-tags:
    • Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiters(YourHtml, "<", ">", 1)
  • Delete multiline comments from DAX- or M-code (like I’ve done here for example):
    • Text.RemoveBetweenDelimiters(YourDAXorMQuery, "/*", "*/", "yes")

So once you enter any value into the fourth parameter, the delimiters themselves will be removed as well.

Enjoy and stay queryious 😉

Debug DAX variables in Power BI and Power Pivot

When you’re dealing with a beast like DAX you can use any help there is, right? So here I show you how you can debug DAX variables who contain tables or show the result of multiple variables at once. So you can easily compare them with each other to spot the reason for problems fast.

Please note, that currently only comma separated DAX code is supported.

Example

Watch this measure from Gerhard Brueckl’s brilliant solution for dynamic TopN clustering with others. It contains 5 variables who return tables and one variable with a scalar:

Measure with variables who contain tables and scalars

If you want to follow along how this calculation is evolving for each value in a matrix, my VarDebugMeasure will show details of every variable like so:

Measure to debug DAX variables

Method

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DAX CALCULATE Debugger

CALCULATE is the most powerful function in DAX, as it allows you to change the filter context under which its expression is evaluated to your hearts content. But with big number of options to choose from, often comes big frustration when the results don’t match expectations. Often this is because your syntax to modify the filter context doesn’t do what you’ve intended. Unfortunately CALCULATE only displays its result and not how it achieved it, so debugging becomes a challenge. This is where my CALCULATE Debugger measure can help out:

DAX CALCULATE Debugger

This is a measure that returns a text-value, showing the number of rows of the adjusted filter context table, the MIN and MAX value of the selected column as well as up to the first 10 values. Just place this measure beneath the CALCULATE-measure in question and try to find the error 😉

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The full Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

In a previous post I introduced the concept of a function that searches for an occurrence of a character or string within all columns of a table. Here I share the full “Table.ContainsAnywhere” – function with parameters for many useful options.

Function parameters and options

  1.  The first parameter “MyTable” refers to the table to search through
  2.  The 2nd parameter “MySearchStrings” can be either a text field or a list of strings to be searched for. The function will take care of any of these cases automatically.
  3.  If the 2nd parameter is a list and this 3rd parameter is null or not speified, the function will return true if any of the list items is found within the table. But if set to “All”, all list items have to be found somewhere in the table for the function to return true.
  4.  By default, the search will be made in a case sensitive mode (as this is the default-mode in Power Query). But any entry into the 4th function parameter will turn this to a case insensitive mode instead.
  5.  By default, the string or list entry has to match fully with any entry in the table. Again, any entry in the 5th parameter swaps that to a partial match.

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Bug in Power BI R Scripts “package … was installed with different internals”

Today I spent many hours hunting an R-script error in Power BI and before Steph Locke came up with a solution for this, I came across a couple of posts and heard of other people, having the same problem. This blogpost is to make distribution of the solution a bit easier and to hopefully to help other folks with the same problem in the future.

The Problem

When running R-scripts in Power BI, I got all sorts of error-messages who all had one thing in common: They were complaining about one or more packages being installed by an R version with different internals. Read more

A new Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

The native Table.Contains-function in Power Query tells you if one or more strings are included in one or more of its columns. But you have to be specific about which strings you search in which column. But what to do if you want to search a string in all of its columns instead? Use my new Table.ContainsAnywhere function.

Problem

In the native function, you have to pass in a record with search term and column name. So if you search for “blue” in column “Description”, your formula would look like so:

Table.Contains( YourTableName, [Description = "blue"] )

But that’s not what I want in this case. I want the formula to search through all columns within the table for the occurrence of “blue”.

Solution

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