Line breaks

[DanBrill]

This has probably been addressed many times, but my searches aren't bearing fruit. I think there are too many topics with similar key words for me to find what I'm looking for. Plus the Forum is running slowly (or slooooowly as many have put it lately) and I'm getting antsy.

Anyway, I'm importing some xml, which is, if you aren't up on xml, just plain text. What character or code should I use in a plain text file so that it is interpreted as a line break once it is imported into FM? I tried '

[BobWeaver]

You need to use an ASCII 11 (vertical tab) character. Filemaker interprets these as linebreaks when importing.

[DanBrill]

Thanks, Bob.

We've discovered that this actually doesn't work with xml imports. FM interprets ASCII 11 as an illegal character. 10 and 13 seem to be fine, but not 11.

For more on this, see todays posts in the XML forum.

Thanks,

Dan

[BobWeaver]

Good point. I remember a similar problem myself when importing an XML file. Filemaker would not accept any control characters.

Have you tried using the HTML linebreak or paragraph tags?

<BR> or <P>

Eg:

Al<BR>Bill<BR>Charlie<BR>Dave<BR>Ed<BR>Frank<BR>George<BR>Herb<BR>Iggy<BR>Jack

[DanBrill]

Tried both of those. They import literally. So what we did was stick in the phrase 'SpecialLineBreakIndicator' where it was needed. Once imported into FM we the Substitute function to substitute 'SpecialLineBreakIndicator' with the paragraph tag.

This works and is aparently the best we can do. Now we just need everyone to promise never to name any of their kids SpecialLineBreakIndicator or they won't show up in this list.

Dan

[Ugo DI LUCA]

Dan,

I haven't read the whole thread nor the one where Fenton apparently helped you, but I also often use these "litteral" separators or substitutors. At first, I used "FMBreakHereFM", but it could be a good idea to find something really unique though.

If this "Parsing" script also includes intermediary or future steps, where for instance you'd target ones kid name, you may have trouble if some kids name are "Alline" or "Kindi" or "Indi" .

Just a warning if it was the case.

My special Break is "8R

[BobWeaver]

Dan, what software are you exporting from? Can you insert a real carriage return in the data? It seems to me that you should be able to specify a line break with some kind of tag, but the tag may have to start at the beginning of a line like this:

Al

<BR>Bill

<BR>Charlie

<BR>Dave

<BR>Ed

<BR>Frank

<BR>George

<BR>Herb

<BR>Iggy

<BR>Jack

Alas, I have almost no experience with xml, and I don't know too much about how it differs from html, so I'm kinda guessing here.

[DanBrill]

The data is coming from QuickBooks, which has its own xml specification. There's no way to do what you're suggesting on the xml side -- what you get is what you get. The only hope has been to insert the line breaks during the transformation, when the QuickBooks xml is transformed into the FileMaker xml via an xslt (eXtensible stylesheet language transformation). But since FM won't accept ASCII 11, and interprets <BR> and