how can I import a this text file ??

[Steven Cappiello]

Dear all,

I have a text file that has a ton of names & addresses separated by one or sometimes two carriage returns. (There is also a carriage return at the end of each line)

example:

Tom Smith

12 Park Place

New York, NY 10034

Bill Frankel

PO Box 974

Mills Highway

Minneapolis, MN 34387

Janet Parker

UCLA

West Wing

Box 4343

Los Angeles, CA 94372

.

.

.

Could someone recommend the easiest way to import this information into a simple Filemaker database ?

I'd be happy with having each person having their own record, and getting the name into a "name" field and the rest of the address into an "address" field. It would be great if I could make an attempt to get the last line of the address to import into "city" , "state" and "postal code" fields as well.

Many thanks in advance!!

Steven

[Charles Delfs]

since there is a double CR in between each entry you can do a bit of preimport work. But, another problem is that some entries have more lines. If you just want to import data and not worry too much about getting it into the right field eg addr1, addr2, addr3 and addr4 then this technique will work

backup your file.

In a word processor Replace all double CR's with a place holder not in the file eg a pipe '|' char.

then replace all single CR's with comma's

then replace all placeholder pipes with CR's

this will put each entry on a seperat full line sererated by commas.

when you import, match up your fields as best as possible.

c.

[Fenton]

This is a bit of a problem. I see you say you're a newbie. Well, I can think of two approaches, neither very easy, but doable.

As Charles says, you're going to be using a text editor to do some work first, converting the double carriage returns as he says. You might want to use Tabs instead of commas as field separators; that's my personal preference (more common on Macs).

It would be good to use a text editor. I use BBEdit (barebones.com), but it's expensive and overkill for this. They also make TextWrangler ($50). There's a new free editor, named Smultron, which seems fairly good, Cocoa-based (versiontracker.com). Or any editor you want.

The two approaches are, basically:

1. Use a high-end text editor to "munge" the data extensively so that it imports directly into the FileMaker fields. This will involve using "grep."

or

2. Use a low-end editor to just do the carriage returns, and add field separators, as mentioned earlier, then import into a temporary FileMaker file and create scripts to validate and move data to what you think are the right fields.

Both methods require some work. Either will be better than manually fixing "tons" (ie., >2000) of names/addresses.

What I see as a possible pattern for either method is that fact that different blocks of text have different number of lines. It appears that the 3 line blocks would all follow the same rule. The 4 and 5 line blocks may not have a consistent pattern however. If they did, then it would be fairly simple to know where things went by just seeing how many fields (columns) had data in them in each record (block).

A looping script could therefore take any record of the temp file, see how many fields had data, then set the appropriate fields in a final file. Perhaps it could look for other characteristics, such as whether there was a number in the field. It's hard to say without seeing a larger sample of the data. These address blocks can be devilish; but by carefully going for patterns you can usually get almost all the data right.

Feel free to attach a larger sample text file for us to look at (but maybe not the whole thing :-) The 3 above are too easy; I'm sure there's more to it.