Absolute value (abs)

[ 1 Description ] [ 2 How does it work in the search window? ] [ 3 How does it work in LINQ? ]

Description

This adds a new column that returns the non-negative values of the numbers in a numeric field, regardless of their signs. For example, given the numbers -4, 1024 and -3.14, you will get 4, 1024 and 3.14.

How does it work in the search window?

Select Create column in the search window toolbar, then select the Absolute value operation. You need to specify one argument:

Argument	Data type

Argument	Data type
Number of any sign ^mandatory	integer, float

The data type of the values in the new column is integer or float, depending on the selected input data.

Example

The examples in this article use values in a data table generated from the following CSV file.

If you want to try the example for yourself, download the file and upload it to your domain clicking Data upload in the navigation pane. Name the new table my.upload.sample.data and select Current date as Date parsing type. Learn more about uploading data in Uploading log files.

After receiving the confirmation message, you can access the table from the Finder, selecting my → upload → sample → data. When you upload data from a file, all the information is included in a single column called message. To split the values into different columns, you can use the Split operation. Click Toggle Query Editor in the search window toolbar and paste the following LINQ query to save time:

from my.upload.sample.data
select split(message, ";", 18) as negNumbers
select int(negNumbers) as negNumbers_int

We want to get the absolute values of all the numbers in the negNumbers_int column. To do it, we will create a new column using the Absolute value operation. Let's call the new column abs_values

The arguments needed to create the new column are:

Number of any sign - negNumbers_int column

Click Create column and you will see the following result:

How does it work in LINQ?

Use the operator select... as... and add the operation syntax to create the new column. This is the syntax for the Absolute value operation:

abs(number)

Example

You can copy the following LINQ script and try the above example on the my.upload.sample.data table.

from my.upload.sample.data
select split(message, ";", 18) as negNumbers
  select int(negNumbers) as negNumbers_int,
    abs(negNumbers_int) as abs_values