Unable to view full cell text content in KNIME Table View

[phil21oo]

Hi everyone,

I’m working with KNIME and generating long text outputs (e.g., blog articles) inside a single column. Some of these texts are over 1,000 words long.

The problem is that in KNIME’s standard Table View, I can’t see the full content of a cell — it’s truncated. There doesn’t seem to be an option to expand the cell fully or scroll inside it, which makes it hard to review and edit the complete text directly in KNIME.

I’ve tried right-clicking the cell to see if there’s an “Open in separate view” option, but I can’t find anything that works for regular String cells.

My questions:

• Is there any built-in way to open and view the entire cell content in KNIME without exporting it?
• Are there any nodes or extensions (Java Snippet, Python Script, etc.) that can help display long text more conveniently?
• How do others handle very long text data in KNIME when they need to inspect or edit it?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

[sauberns]

Could you use the String Format Manager node to wrap the text to the column width? Not exactly what you want, but a start.

String Format Manager

(the other)
Simon

[takbb]

Hi @phil21oo , this will depend on your version of KNIME and whether you are using Classic or Modern UI, but in the most recent releases, when using Modern UI, a string cell in the table can be opened in a popup window that contains a scrollbar so you can view the entire contents. I cannot recall which version this functionality first appeared. Possibly 5.3 but certainly its in 5.4 and 5.5.

Double-click a string cell, or click the small blue square that appears in a string cell when you hover over it, and it opens in a popup window. This only seems to work from “data preview” panel at the bottom of the Modern UI screen though. Although the icon appears in String cells in popup windows, the cell doesn’t have the same additional popup functionality. Not sure if that’s a bug or a technical limitation with already-popped-up windows.

e.g.

In classic UI, I don’t have a suggestion other than having an external editor open into which you can paste the contents of the cell you want to inspect. Click in the String cell of interest then use the shortcut key for Copy (e.g. Ctrl-C in Windows), then paste into the external editor. (e.g. Ctrl-V). Slightly clunky but not too bad if you have dual screens.

edit: A further thought - in Classic UI in Windows you could use the free tool “Auto Hot Key”, and have a script running in the background so that whenever you pressed a specific key sequence (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-C), this opened Notepad and copy/pasted that currently selected text into it. This effectively gives you a popup window function.

e.g. an AHK script such as this might do it:

^!c::
{
    ; Copy selected text
    Send("^c")
    Sleep(200)  ; Wait for clipboard to update

    ; Open a new instance of Notepad
    Run("notepad.exe")
    WinWaitActive("ahk_exe notepad.exe")

    ; Paste clipboard into Notepad
    Send("^v")
}