Looker displaying Greek letter phi instead of a text string

[Jeff_Franklin]

The values in this field are all short (4 or 5 character) strings, but in the Explore Looker is displaying all of them with what looks like the letter phi (middle column):

when I attempt to drill down into one of them, it brings up a filter that shows the actual string, but if I do try to use the filter, it throws an error.  Is there a known display issue?  Gemini points to character set encoding, but that seems unlikely.

[JuliaKO · Accepted solution]

Interesting case 🤔 I would also test if COALESCE(your_field, 'Unknown') returns 'Unknown' everywhere and check if the auto-generated query uses joins that might produce null values.
Is type: string explicitly set in the dimension definition? Also, what error message do you get when applying a filter to that field?

[JuliaKO]

Hey @Jeff_Franklin, Have you tried modifying the field definition using operators like TRIM(), REGEXP_REPLACE(), or CAST() to check if special characters are causing the issue?

[Jeff_Franklin]

I did TRIM() and CAST as string, separately, and also queried the original dataset for the relevant records, exported to JSON, and got the below.  Usually the JSON will show me anything like trailing spaces, but not seeing anything weird here.

[JuliaKO · Accepted solution]

Interesting case 🤔 I would also test if COALESCE(your_field, 'Unknown') returns 'Unknown' everywhere and check if the auto-generated query uses joins that might produce null values.
Is type: string explicitly set in the dimension definition? Also, what error message do you get when applying a filter to that field?

[Jeff_Franklin · Accepted solution]

JuliaK, you are my favorite person on the internet today.  In the view, I had the record type configured as number, but it's a string.  When I checked the error message you pointed me to, it told me "invalid number format" or something similar.  Went back and fixed the view, now it's working perfectly.  Thank you!

[GavinW]

Just a callout that symbol is for 'null' - not zero, it's basically saying 'there are no records for this'.