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Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am wondering if there is a way to copy the text from one field to a new field, but eliminate specific words. For example:

**Old Field**                         **New Field**

Killbear Provincial Park               Killbear
Quetico Provincial Park                Quetico
La Cloche Provincial Park              La Cloche
Wildcat Hill Provincial Park           Wildcat Hill

I thought of trying a trim function, but not all the values have the same start location or trim length.

Thanks...

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

In your attribute table create a new string column and then use the field calculator as follows:

 replace(OLD_FIELD, 'Provincial Park','')

The problem with this approach is that your fields won't be trimmed, so you can do the following little hack to address that:

 replace(OLD_FIELD, ' Provincial Park ','')
 replace(OLD_FIELD, ' Provincial Park','')
 replace(OLD_FIELD, 'Provincial Park ','')
 replace(OLD_FIELD, 'Provincial Park','')
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Thank you, that worked great... – Ryan Garnett Sep 7 '12 at 13:46
up vote 1 down vote

How about removing all the occurrences of " Provincial Park" A search/replace ought to do the trick.

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Thank you work. I didn't know you could do a replace in QGIS, I see the Search option, but not the replace – Ryan Garnett Sep 7 '12 at 13:03
If you're working with a shapefile, you could edit the .dbf file directly with Excel and do your search/replace there. Unfortunately newer versions of Excel (2007, 2010) no longer let you save to DBF. Would work if you have Excel 2003 or earlier. – Rayner Sep 7 '12 at 13:07
1  
There's always LibreOffice Calc which handles DBF files just fine. – n1kn0k Mar 6 at 3:32
Good to know. Wasn't aware of that. Thanks. – Rayner Mar 6 at 12:57

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