Mac vrs PC Line Breaks

[manitobaangler]

Have a runtime FM 5 solution that resides on client stations. In it, there's a predetermined tab delimited export which is imported into WebObjects through a browser, WO then builds and populates an OpenBase db based on that exported file. Process works great when a PC creates the export. However, when a mac creates the export...WO only creates a single record and errors out. What's happening is that the line break characters are different for each file. What we need to do is to figure out how to save the Mac tab delimited file export with PC line breaks.

Have thought about creating a single field which concatenates all the records and have it manually place the PC return/line break in. (what is it anyways?) However, we're dealing with possibly hundreds of records as a time and the field character limit may come into play.

Any sugs?

[BobWeaver]

PC's use carriage return (ascii 13) and linefeed (ascii 10), while Macs use only carriage return. If you have some kind of file editor utility available that does a search and replace, you can search for carriage return and replace with carriage return linefeed. I can email you a Mac utility that I created to do this if you like.

If you want to do it inside filemaker, it will be a bit messy but can be done. Make a calculated field to replace the first exported field like so:

cFirstField = Case(Status(CurrentRecordNo)>1,gLinefeedChar,"")&FirstField

Set storage options to unstored.

This will place a linefeed at the beginning of every line except the first one. gLinefeedChar is a global field that contains a linefeed character which you will have to paste in from somewhere(?).

Before you export, create one blank record at the end of the found set. After you're done, delete the record.

The net result is that you get a CR/LF between each exported record.

HTH