O$: couple questions

[Alan Schmidt]

on 4/11/09 9:04 AM, Andy Hilton at andyh at totallybrilliant.com wrote:

> Alan
> 
> In my opinion it's not a bug if you are set to use quote marks as your text
> delimiter and then have a quote mark inside your data, however unpalatable
> that may appear ! Change your text delimiter in whatever is creating the
> file to be imported....:)
> 
I agree with you. I'm referring to tab delimited file with a double quote
inside. That should be acceptable and did work prior to Studio 4.3. This is
fault #ST/IE/104. Support says it will be fixed in v5.

> I have used for many years Kellys most excellent ParseFile external for
> doing text manipulations that involve oddball data importing....it has been
> a lifesaver on innumerable occasions.....
> 
> You are right that the line return is the delimiter used for determining the
> 'field' being imported so it itself is not imported no....just beware of the
> fact that it is easy to receive text files where a line return gets ignored
> if it is of the wrong type and then you end up with an unholy mess of text
> to deal with where the columns all go wrong and you want to give up and go
> home....!! The joys of importing....
> 
Hmmm... in a text file what else could be used other than chr(012) or 015?

Thanks for the info Andy.

-Alan


> On 4/11/09 11:54 AM, "Alan Schmidt" <alan at goconnected.com> wrote:
> 
>> on 4/11/09 8:44 AM, Andy Hilton at andyh at totallybrilliant.com wrote:
>> 
>>> Alan
>>> 
>>> I don't know of any 'bugs' with Import field from file, however there are
>>> many and various things that can occur from the actual data that you
>>> import....these mostly center around things like line ending characters and
>>> so on - essentially it is all to do with the formatting of the text being
>>> imported, so for example having quote marks within your data can be ruinous
>>> to an import which is using quote marks to wrap around text !
>> 
>> This is exactly the situation I'm using it for, because the Import Data
>> command has such a nasty bug when trying to import double quotes.
>> 
>>> Then you also
>>> get the thorny old issue of mac data and windows data using differing hex
>>> characters for line returns....
>>> 
>> I thought that might be an issue but in my tests (on a Mac) I don't see any
>> line return chars. Looks to me like it imports the record less the line
>> return. Is that incorrect?
>> 
>>> None of which I would say are 'bugs' but all of which can give you great
>>> pains !!!
>>> 
>>> Regarding the use of $add - there are various things to consider in what you
>>> say you want....using $add with no parameters should give you a line with
>>> nulls in each column - this may not be what you really want, as 'empty' can
>>> mean different things to different people ! Your backend may reject certain
>>> columns with nulls in them, that's a different story....
>>> 
>> Yes, good point about nulls. I'm not using with a SQL backend but that's
>> still something to be aware of.
>> 
>>> Hope that may help
>>> 
>> Does help- Thanks Andy.
>> 
>> -Alan
>> 
>> 
>>> On 4/11/09 11:13 AM, "Alan Schmidt" <alan at goconnected.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 1. Is anyone aware of issues (bugs) with the ³Import field from file²
>>>> command? Especially when used with tab delimited files.
>>>> 2. Is Do MyList.$add(Œ¹) an absolutely safe way to add an empty line to a
>>>> list or is there a better way? The list has multiple columns and I want
>>>> each
>>>> column to be empty.
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you and Happy Easter.
>>>> 
>>>> -Alan
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