Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

When you get data in sentences: how to use a spreadsheet to extract numbers from phrases

Online Journalism Blog: “Earlier this month the BBC Data Unit published a story on unduly lenient sentences which involved working with data that was trapped in phrases. We needed to be able to take a collection of words such as “11 years and 5 months’ imprisonment” and convert that into something that could be used in spreadsheet calculations (specifically, comparing the lengths of time represented by two different phrases). It’s a problem you come across every so often as a journalist — especially with FOI requests — so in this post — taken from the book Finding Stories in Spreadsheets — I’ll explain how to do that. First, here’s what the data looks like..”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.