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Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

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    Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

    I'm not asking how at the moment just if it is possible...

    I have a piece of equipment that performs tests for me. It saves the tests in a proprietry format.

    If I open the proprietry Reports in an application such as Wordpad or I guess MS Word then, I seem to get most of the bare bones meat of the report (without the pretty formatting), but it's spread all over the page.

    What I'm wondering is if using things like Trim etc I'm likely to be able get rid of all the white space and then import the data to a table.

    Wonder if A5 will introduce an Attachment data type with next version?

    Thanks]
    Mike

    #2
    Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

    Mike,
    My first thought is if there is no formatting whatsoever, then all of the data would end up going into one field and possibly just one record. There has to be some consistency in order to set some type of delimiter; comma, space, tab, quotes, lf, cr-lf, whathaveyou.

    Regarding white space, I remember a script or UDF here on the messageboard in the last year that did just this--cancelled all spaces except for one between words--think I even gave a regex for it as an alternative.
    Mike
    __________________________________________
    It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
    It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
    Henry David Thoreau
    __________________________________________



    Comment


      #3
      Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

      Mike_D - if the text contains only ASCII text, and if the report format is fixed, then yes, Alpha has the tools necessary to open the report file, read each line, parse that line, then read the next... continuing until all lines have been processed.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

        Thanks Mike and Tom

        I have not tried opening one of the files since before Xmas but I'll give it another go...though pretty sure that once you open in an .rtf format there is no formatting what so ever ...no comma or tab delimiting just all the info scattered what appears to be randomly throughout a lot of white space.

        Thanks
        Mike

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

          RTF text is not "unformatted text". Nothing that I said before applies when working with RTF text. I was speaking of unformatted ASCII text. A very different thing than rtf files. It's the difference between Notepad text, and a WordPad RTF file. Examine both with a hex editor to see the differences.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

            I have never imported .rtf files myself. But as a guess my first thought would be to read in the .rtf file line by line then use *RTF_TO_PLAIN() to strip the special formatting characters and output to a text file. Then examine the text file and see if you now have text that can be more easily extracted. It may require a little more massaging to get there but this should get you closer.

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

              Originally posted by ZaphodBBB View Post
              Wonder if A5 will introduce an Attachment data type with next version?
              MIke

              I just read this article about the Attachment data type. It looks to me that you link from the access report to the program that opens the appropriate file and displays.

              Is there something else that I should be looking at to understand more about this access feature?

              Otherwise, with a5v9 you could create a link in a report and call sys_open() and do the same thing..

              I'm seeing that as a different issue than reading data that is in another format.... which I don't see an attachment data type doing.

              tks
              Al Buchholz
              Bookwood Systems, LTD
              Weekly QReportBuilder Webinars Thursday 1 pm CST

              Occam's Razor - KISS
              Normalize till it hurts - De-normalize till it works.
              Advice offered and questions asked in the spirit of learning how to fish is better than someone giving you a fish.
              When we triage a problem it is much easier to read sample systems than to read a mind.
              "Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler."
              Albert Einstein

              http://www.iadn.com/images/media/iadn_member.png

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                Originally posted by ZaphodBBB View Post
                It saves the tests in a proprietry format.
                What format?

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                  I'll try opening the proprietry report from teh test unit into say Notepad and see what happens and report back.

                  I have not used the Attachment type just read about it while reading a review of the Access 2007.

                  Hi Al being new I know next to zip about Alpha but I'll have to have a read about the sys_open() feature you mention. Though it would be nice to be able to import.

                  Thanks again and reprot back shortly.

                  Mike

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                    Just tried opening the report in Notepad and I see a lot more info than previously...looks like some kind of XML with formatting.

                    Including a sample report zipped up if anyone has time to have a look at it.

                    Cheers
                    Mike

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                      Originally posted by ZaphodBBB View Post
                      Just tried opening the report in Notepad and I see a lot more info than previously...looks like some kind of XML with formatting.

                      Including a sample report zipped up if anyone has time to have a look at it.

                      Cheers
                      Mike

                      Try this..
                      Al Buchholz
                      Bookwood Systems, LTD
                      Weekly QReportBuilder Webinars Thursday 1 pm CST

                      Occam's Razor - KISS
                      Normalize till it hurts - De-normalize till it works.
                      Advice offered and questions asked in the spirit of learning how to fish is better than someone giving you a fish.
                      When we triage a problem it is much easier to read sample systems than to read a mind.
                      "Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler."
                      Albert Einstein

                      http://www.iadn.com/images/media/iadn_member.png

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                        Originally posted by Al Buchholz View Post
                        Sure am glad they don't put this stuff in the Help file anymore.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                          Thanks for the pointer to the tutorial on parsing XML using XBasic Al.
                          It is good to know it can be done. Now I just need to begin getting familiar with A5 then one of these fine days I'll give it a shot. Still the fact that it can be done means I'll stick with trying to use Alpha instead of putting it off till one of these days.

                          Again many thanks for all your help.

                          Mike

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                            Ok, I thought I try a few quick things... copied your file and gave it XML extension. Then opened it in Explorer and UltraEdit and it looked just like it does in notepad. Then I thought I'd try Excel and it yielded better results.

                            In Excel 2003, open a blank sheet and on the menu click
                            DATA>>XML>> IMPORT and select your file in the open file dialog.

                            It creates a data table but since I don't know what I'm looking at I can not tell if its of any value or not.
                            Dave

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: Importing unformatted text into A5.. Is it possible?

                              Hi Dave

                              Thanks for the tip, I am not a user of Excel so never even thought to try it. I'll give it a go tomorrow and see what it looks like.

                              Cheers
                              Mike

                              Comment

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