Exporting with CR/LF from Mac

[Bill Driskell]

I need to export some data from Filemaker Pro 7 and it needs to have a CR/LF at the end of each record. If I do this on a PC it works fine. On my Mac it only puts a CR at the end. Is there a way to put both the CR and LF on a Mac?

[BobWeaver]

In your export dialog you can select the export character set. You should use either Windows (ANSI) or ASCII (DOS).

[TahitiFM]

I need to do the same thing ... I'm exporting to a text file (from FM7 on the Mac). I then need to open this text file in Windows, but the CR is not recognized (much less a LF). Answer IDs 949 and 4071 (on the Filemaker.com support site) touch on this subject. However neither answers the question on how to implement embedding of the Windows CR/LF in the text file generated on FM Mac.

I've tried all the export formats : ANSI, ASCII, Unicode, but to no avail. The CR generated on the Mac shows up as a null (a square box) when the file is opened in Windows (using a simple text program like Notepad).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Kavika

[comment]

I believe it's a bug. In any case, I haven't been able to get CR/LF endings in a Windows/DOS type export, and I gather from a recent thread that the same is true (mirrored) for FMP on Windows.

I would post-process the exported file in a text editor, such as TextWrangler (free).

[Fenton]

You can also export as xml and use an xsl stylesheet to explicitly write the line separator. I've used the Unix line return, LF only:

<xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>

which, when saved as Unicode will open on either Mac or Windows.

You can also post-process the file with AppleScript:

set outputFile to (((path to desktop) as text) & "gText.txt") as file specification

tell application "Finder" -- needed inside FileMaker

set theText to read outputFile

set old_delimts to AppleScript's text item delimiters

try

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {ASCII character 13}

set textList to text items of theText

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {(ASCII character 13) & (ASCII character 10)}

set newText to (textList as text)

on error errMess number errNum

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to old_delimts

end try

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}

open for access outputFile with write permission

set eof of outputFile to 0

write newText to outputFile starting at eof

close access outputFile

end tell