Cookbook: standardize names and values. Closes wireservice#612 closes w…

…ireservice#613.

docs/cookbook.rst

@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ Welcome to the agate cookbook, a source of how-to's and use cases.
     cookbook/filter
     cookbook/sort
     cookbook/search
+    cookbook/standardize
     cookbook/statistics
     cookbook/compute
     cookbook/datetime
@@ -38,6 +39,7 @@ Basics
 * `Filtering rows of data <cookbook/filter.html>`_
 * `Sorting rows of data <cookbook/sort.html>`_
 * `Searching through a table <cookbook/search.html>`_
+* `Standardize names and values <cookbook/standardize.html>`_
 * `Calculating statistics <cookbook/statistics.html>`_
 * `Computing new columns <cookbook/compute.html>`_
 * `Handling dates and times <cookbook/datetime.html>`_

docs/cookbook/standardize.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+============================
+Standardize names and values
+============================
+
+Standardize row and columns names
+=================================
+
+The :meth:`Table.rename` method has arguments to convert row or column names to slugs and append unique identifiers to duplicate values.
+
+Using an existing table object:
+
+.. code-block:: python
+
+    # Convert column names to unique slugs
+    table.rename(slug_columns=True)
+
+    # Convert row names to unique slugs
+    table.rename(slug_rows=True)
+
+    # Convert both column and row names to unique slugs
+    table.rename(slug_columns=True, slug_rows=True)
+
+Standardize column values
+=========================
+
+agate has a :class:`Slug` computation that can be used to also standardize text column values. The computation has an option to also append unique identifiers to duplicate values.
+
+Using an existing table object:
+
+.. code-block:: python
+
+    # Convert the values in column 'title' to slugs
+    new_table = table.compute([
+        ('title-slug', agate.Slug('title'))
+    ])
+    
+    # Convert the values in column 'title' to unique slugs
+    new_table = table.compute([
+        ('title-slug', agate.Slug('title', ensure_unique=True))
+    ])