Stripping high bits from copy and paste text?

[Stephen Osborne]

Some of our operators copy postal codes from the Internet and the resulting text is carried over in Rich Text Format when pasted into the data field. Is there a procedure for stripping the high bits off those copied characters?

Many thanks

--Stephen Osborne

[AaronBBrown]

RE: Stripping high bits from copy and paste text?

I'm not sure I understand your question.

Are you saying you are trying to copy data from a website into an Alpha Five RTF field and it is coming through formatted (red, blue, big small, weird fonts)? In which case, are you asking how to strip off the formatting codes (not the high bits)?

[Stephen Osborne]

RE: Stripping high bits from copy and paste text?

Perhaps I have the language wrong. We are trying to copy data from the web that sometimes gets copied as RTF; when it is pasted into the data field (not an RTF) it retains the font information and when browsed later, has become invisible in the field (although the data is still there: we can go in and one at a time hightlight the field, find the data, and remove what seem to be extra blanks at the end of the data. The data is then okay and always visible.)

[Blake]

RE: Stripping high bits from copy and paste text?

RTF doesn't use high-bits. It's a (really ugly) markup language like HTML. There are coded parts and the main text. For example, one of the A5 docs begins:

{\rtf1\ansi\deff13
{\colortbl;\red0\green0\blue255;\red128\green0\blue128;}
\sectd \ftnbj
{\fonttbl
{\f4\fswiss\fcharset0 MS Sans Serif;}
{\f6\froman\fcharset2 Symbol;}
{\f13\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}
{\f15\froman\fcharset0 Times New Roman;}
}

But the point, really is that it is all plaintext; that's why it's "Rich Text Format", not "Rich Binary Format". :-)

I think it's probably a fairly simple task if you're only worried about cutting-and-pasting, i.e., I think there's a way to use DDE to say "only accept plain text" and the RTF DDE Server will comply--something like that. I have no idea how you'd integrate that into an A5 app, unfortunately.

[Peter.Wayne]

RE: Stripping high bits from copy and paste text?

i am trying to work with the rtf operators -- not terribly successfully, but i think what you want to do is not that difficult.
first, you want to paste the data into an RTF field on a form.
Assume the RTF field is "post_code". then the plain text of the field should be accessed in xbasic as

post_code.rtf.plain_text

e.g. you can have a button:
ui_msg_box("postal code is",post_code.rtf.plain_text)