How to disable text cleaning of answers

[bastianolea]

Description

Answers recorded in the database are cleaned: text gets converted to lowercase, spaces replaced by underscores and other symbols are removed. This means results have to be processed somehow by the user if they need the original question text, maybe manually cleaning the data. Is this avoidable, i.e., is it possible to record answers as they are written in the survey?

[jhelvy]

Just for clarity, there are two different ways values get stored. In mc questions, for example, you can define both the option label (what's displayed in the survey) and the value (what's stored in the database) like this:

sd_question(
  type   = 'mc',
  id     = 'artist',
  label  = "Which artist do you prefer most from this list?",
  option = c(
    "Taylor Swift" = "taylor_swift",
    "Ed Sheeran"   = "ed_sheeran"
  )
)

Here the stored values would be "taylor_swift" or "ed_sheeran". If you don't specify a value though and you just have the labels, then "Taylor Swift" will automatically be converted to "taylor_swift" in the stored database. We mostly do this because it makes everything more consistent. Either way, you still get the lower case snake case value stored.

While we don't have a way to turn this off for now, it is relatively easy to do some quick joins and get the label values back. In the _survey folder, you'll find a questions.yml file that has all of the label-value pairs for every question ID, so if you read that yml file in you can get the exact matches and join back on the labels.

It is a bit tedious, and we could probably make that easier for people if we were to perhaps update sd_get_data() to take in an optional question.yml file that could return the label values in place of the values.