Concat

concat concatenates data from two or more columns or values, and returns a string.

Syntax

concat(value1, value2, ...)

value1, value2 … can be columns or values. Metabase will convert non-string columns into strings before concatenating their values.

Example

Metabase will use unformatted values for non-string columns

When you use non-string columns in concat, Metabase will ignore any formatting that you applied to the columns when converting the column to a string.

For example, if you formatted a number to display only the first two decimal digits in the table results, the results of concat would still include additional decimal digits (if any) found in the raw results.

Accepted data types

Non-string types will be converted to strings. Regardless of the type of the value passed to concat, the result will be a string.

Related functions

This section covers functions and formulas that work the same way as the Metabase concat expression, with notes on how to choose the best option for your use case.

• SQL
• Spreadsheets
• Python

SQL

In most cases (unless you’re using a NoSQL database), questions created from the notebook editor are converted into SQL queries that run against your database or data warehouse.

If our sample data is stored in a relational database:

SELECT
    CONCAT(City, ", ", Country) AS "Location"
FROM
    richard_linklater_films;

is equivalent to the Metabase concat expression:

concat([City], ", ", [Country])

Spreadsheets

If our sample data is in a spreadsheet where “City” is in column A, and “Country” in column B, we can create a third column “Location” like this:

=CONCATENATE(A2, ", ", B2)

which is equivalent to the Metabase concat expression:

concat([City], ", ", [Country])

Python

Assuming the sample data is in a dataframe column called df:

df["Location"] = df["City"] + ", " + df["Country"]

is the same as the Metabase concat expression:

concat([City], ", ", [Country])

Further reading

• Custom expressions documentation
• Custom expressions tutorial