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[REQUEST] - Updating OpenRefine Wrapper to upload txt - files #4
Description
Your OpenRefine integration is very popular in the Humanities - thank you very much for integrating it.
A colleague from DaSCH wants to be able to use OpenRefine uploads in txt with specified table widths. OpenRefine locally already supports this - our interactive tool does not. Would it be possible to adjust the current wrapper to include this?
I am attaching the information I got and the input info I have below.
Basic Example
Example input: https://www.gautschy.ch/~rita/archast/mond/Thebenletzte.txt
The updated wrapper should enable uploading the txt and use predefined widths.
"These are files that were generated as output from astronomical calculations using Fortran programmes a little over 15 years ago. In Fortran, you create a formatted output – you specify how many spaces there should be between entries and how many digits each entry should have. In order to read this back in and do something with it, I would need to be able to specify how many digits a column contains (see screenshot).
This works wonderfully with OpenRefine on the computer. For example, I can specify that the date consists of the first three entries, the corresponding time from the next three entries, and so on. Once I have all the entries in a column, I can format them so that I end up with a .tsv file that I can continue working with on Galaxy."
Would it be possible to update the wrapper to enable uploading the txt and use predefined widths so the user can do those steps in Galaxy directly?
I would really appreciate it if you could take a look. Thanks a lot in advance!
Activity
yvanlebras commentedon Apr 30, 2026
Hi Daniela! Thank you for creating this issue! I can look at it.
A question I have is: what is needed is "just" adding the "txt" datatype as input for openrefine? Or more is needed... I need to (re)dive into the Docker image to look at the manner we "force" the input datafile to be useable from inside OpenRefine, as if I well remember, this can be maybe something allowing only csv or tabular files and thus, oblige to also modify the Galaxy tool xml (and maybe the docker image). I add @PaulineSGN as I think she can be the one who can more easily test things locally ;)
A first comment I have is that it seems to me not so complicated to create a tabular / tsv or csv accepted file from a txt file as you mentionned. If I am not wrong, this can led to also "just" a need for some easy pretreatment steps before using OpenRefine Galaxy tool.
Please, if we don't come back to you, don't hesitate to ping me / us!
Sch-Da commentedon May 5, 2026
Hi Yvan,
thank you so much!
The user wanted automatic support for .txt files with predefined column widths, as shown in the screenshot. This is not possible in Galaxy at this point. If you want more details, I am very happy to forward them to the researchers who requested this. I am unfortunately not deep into this. If so, please let me know what you need and I will make contact.
Sch-Da commentedon Jun 10, 2026
Hi @yvanlebras do you have all the necessary info from me here? Otherwise, the user requesting this would also come to GCC if that might help?
Sch-Da commentedon Jun 25, 2026
@profgiuseppe informed me that the image is gone - so I am reuploading it here: