Question about Pulling group/category cues from a label

Question

I'm brand new to JMP, but I've been 1 workshop, so I have a small idea of what sort of tools are available and I thought I might be able to make my life a little easier if I could pull group or category tags out of a file name that I've collected measurements from.

What I have for each project is 40-250 images that have 80+ measurements taken from each. These measurements get put into an excel sheet with each image getting its own column under the file name of the image which looks something like:

1501-169 BgnKO SLRP2 A1 p150 pt1 60000X 26627.tif

Included in there is an animal idetifier, project info, genetic background, age and tissue type as well as a image number. Right now what I'm doing is manually reformating my data organization so that all measurements are a single column and making additional columns so I can sort out graphs for the main groups I'm concerned with, age, background and animal.

I know JMP has the ability to analyze text, but between the need to reformating and pulling multiple tags out of a single cell, I'm really not sure what to do.

jules · Accepted Answer

Hi @ThomasA,

There are a number of ways to go about this using column formulas with JMP's character functions to parse your filenames. The Word() function would be especially useful since it can be used to pull out a specific "word" from your filename with a delimiter of your choice (in this case, probably a space). But, before going down that route, you might have good luck with JMP's built-in Text To Columns function, available under the Cols menu > Utilities. First, you'll need to select your filename column in your JMP table (if you don't already have a jmp table of filenames you'll need to import it from your excel file, or if you need to build such a table from a directory of files let me know and we can write some jsl to do that). With the column selected, now go to Cols > Utilities > Text to Columns. JMP will prompt for what you want to use as a delimiter (what it is that separates the "words" you wish to become the values in new columns). Enter a space, and then click OK. JMP will make you new columns for each argument of your filename. Below is a gif showing that operation, and I've included an example dataset with a filename structure like yours.

I hope this helps!

@jules