Openrefine: Remove Blank Columns upon project creation/import

[jenyoung]

Is your feature request related to a problem or area of OpenRefine? Please describe.

Creating/importing a project allows for the removal of blank rows. It would be great to also be able to remove blank columns.

Describe the solution you'd like
Have a similar functionality to Store blank rows with a Store blank columns option.

Additional context
This was discussed on the google group 9/19/2018.

[thadguidry]

Dissimilar to #1472 the Remove Rows with empty cells

[thadguidry]

@wetneb @ostephens could we squeeze this into 3.2 milestone?

[wetneb]

@thadguidry I won't have time to work on this soon, but if someone wants to work to implement this before 3.2 I'm happy to get that on board, yes.

[tommowlam]

This will be particularly useful when importing XML into OpenRefine, where tags that are used for structure but have no direct content themselves, create lots of empty columns that have to then be 'manually' removed - eg:
<poster> <name> <firstname>Tom</firstname> <lastname>Mowlam</lastname> </name> </poster>
...gives empty 'poster' and 'name' columns on import.

[aquaruiz]

May I work on this bug?

[wetneb]

Sure, thanks a lot!

[aquaruiz]

Hey, I did some fixes but I don't get it how to rebuild to check if it works...
./refine build
./refine
Is this all?

[thadguidry]

@aquaruiz Yes, that's how you can do it manually (if not using Maven config and running from directly in your IDE)