breaking up note-field into asmaller part

[ken tjia]

I aprreciate assistance in the creation of a unique function to perform data/text reformatting within a
typical note/memo field.


I have a need to properly breaking up a typical note or memo field into a proper pieces

for example the original data contained in my memo as follow:

"this is a series of stories written in english and french that i would like to translated into a story"

my wish to see the above data to be re-formatted as follow:

a typical 30 charactes per line (maximum)

#)this is a series of stories
#)written in english and
#)french that i would like to
#)translate into a story

requirement :
1) Maximum 30 charactes per line
2) word can not be broken down half way
see for example line #2 above should be ending with
french...but to avaoid violation of maximum characters
and breaking up of such word, it get shifted to line
instead
3) insertion of "#)" sign in front of each line

your help and assistance is greatly appreciated.
ken tjia

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: breaking up note-field into asmaller part

Ken,

This would involve putting your original text in a char type variable, and then stepping through it in 30 char chunks. Each would have to be processed separately, to find the nearest blank space separating words. Each would then be padded with a prefix, and trailing carriage return linefeed pairs, and then passed to a char type variable. Second and later 'chunks' would be concatenated with the earlier chunks. At the end you'd store the newly formatted char string in the note or memo field.

Sounds like a great project to learn about Alpha's string handling functions.

Might also be something you'd want to farm out to a professional consultant.

-- tom

[ken tjia]

RE: breaking up note-field into asmaller part

Thank you for your comments.

What I have done for the last 2 years been done this way:
1) Have the actual memo field available
2) Memo can only be posted from a "dummy" or a variable
which get populated by a ui_get_text statement that
limit to 30 charactes and ending with a "cr"
3) this work very well
4) but now that my data coming from an sql server and you
know the length is out of control hi.
5) just in case you wonder, this is message to go to a typical 2 ways pagers.. and that portion of sending out is working well.
ken tjia