The "Export Field Contents" feature that was added in version 7 is a nice feature, because there is finally a way to export data with line breaks intact. However, text field contents only export as Unicode which is incompatible with many applications. I thought that changing the field options language setting might do the trick, but no. So, some form of post processing is still required. Has anyone found a way to force the text encoding of the export text to ASCII or some other equivalent 8 bit coding?

contents only export as Unicode

Then use Bruce's way in the end of this thread:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat...true#Post155546

...and the export is easily opened in say Appleworks. One thing to remember is the postfix .txt (yikes - not a thing apple geeks likes)

--sd

Unfortunately, this needs to run on both Windows and Mac. I don't actually have any problems with the Mac version; it's the Windows one that's the problem. I guess if I could find some windows based text conversion utility, I could do it with a command line from a Send event script step. But, if I have to do that, I'm no better off than using the standard export.

Well, at least I found a neat solution for the Mac platform. After learning some basic unix commands I came up with a single line shell script that both converts the file from unicode to ascii and renames it.

do shell script "tr -d '000376377' <~/desktop/FMExportFolder/output.txt>~/desktop/FMExportFolder/<<FN>>; rm ~/desktop/FMExportFolder/output.txt"

I put the above text in a global field gConvertApplescript

And then in the perform applescript step I use this formula

Substitute(gConvertApplescript;"<<FN>>";ExportFileName)

The file is exported with the name output.txt, and then converted and renamed to the name stored in field ExportFileName

Now, if anyone knows of a similar thing that could be done in a Windows command line, I would really like to hear about it.