A4v2 delimiter question

[immanuel leung]

Currently we're using comma's as the delimiter, is there a way to easily change it to something else?

Thanks,
Manny

[French]

RE: A4v2 delimiter question

perhaps with a bit more detail about what you are doing and what you want to do we'd be better able to respond.

What are you using a comma to delimit, and what do you want to change it to?

[immanuel leung]

RE: A4v2 delimiter question

We are exporting data from Alpha Four version 2 to a new database created in/with Java/Sql. The computer consultant tried to export the data to an ASCII file, which uses commas to separate the fields in one long list. However, many of our fields actually contain commas and this has made it impossible to recognize the field separations. Is it possible to change the deliniation to a double semicolon or a semi colon and colon-something like that? This would help separte the data. Or is there another way you suggest to export the data from Alpha Four ?

[French]

RE: A4v2 delimiter question

There appear to be several options.

When you perform your Character Separated ASCII export, one of the screens that comes up after you name the export file, select the fields to export, select range criteria, is a place where you can change ASCII File Settings. You can change the field delimiter to some character other than the comma on this screen. The second setting you can change is whether or not to enclose character fields in quotation marks, which if selected, should allow your programmers to distinguish between commas used as field delimiters (if you don't change that) and commas in the midst of data in a character field.

Another way to approach the whole thing would be to switch to the type of export to Table ASCII. That leaves you without field delimiters and all your programmers have to know is the width of each field, something easily determined and dealt with.

There are other ways to get where you want to go as well...