ASCII export

[chrisellenj]

Hi

Can anyone help me. I have to export invoices from Filemaker as an ASCII file so that they will go in to another program. It is a banking piece of software.

Many thanks

[Wim Decorte]

Export as text or csv gives you that. Now the problem may be that the other software expects the data in a certain order. If you can't do that with a normal export you can do an export to XML and write a small XSLT to transform the XML into a properly formatted text file.

[chrisellenj]

Thank you for your reply. I have tried this but the file which is expected does not have a paragraph return as the end of record delimiter, it expects a particular ascii character. I could perhaps find and change in some wordprocessing software. Yes the order is very important. I am not sure what you mean ....by XML and write a small XSLT to transform the XML into a properly formatted text file. The software is aused by a large banking company. Thanks again

[Fenton]

With an XML export you generally have to write an XSL stylesheet to transform the raw FM xml into what you want. You can look in the XML forum here, at some exporting examples to see what it may look like. Almost every case is different. It's pretty much a "roll your own" format. The default data and line separators are NONE. So you have to put what you want. To do so you put the character much as you would with HTML.

 is a tab

 is a Windows "return" (2 characters)

 is a Unix return, which Windows can also recognize if the character type is Unicode



The character encoding is another setting, which is declared at the top, after the mandatory xml declaration, in the xsl:output element.

 is Unicode, the default for XML

 is Western (ISO Latin 1)

 is Western (Windows Latin 1)

At least that's what BBEdit tells me. I've not used the "windows-1252". Perhaps Wim or others can comment on what is normally expected on PCs. Modern apps generally accept utf-8. Basically you'd need to match whatever the bank wants. And the fact that they're using ASCII instead of Unicode means it's probably old.