Importing Long Columns from Oracle

[BeckyMN]

I'm importing data into Filemaker (version 8.5) from an Oracle 8i database. All goes well except for columns that are called "long" by Oracle. These "long" columns can contain lots of text and are (I think) not indexable. The text in these "long" columns imports fine except that there are some extra characters at the end or the beginning of every line. The characters appear to be spaces and rectangles but they are not easily selectable with the mouse or arrow keys. I tried substituting these character with a simple native Filemaker carriage return but no luck.

Anybody know how to how to clean them out after the import or better yet prevent them from being imported in the first place?

Thanks for your help!

[comment]

An example file would be useful. In any case, see if this can help:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/187935/

[BeckyMN]

Thanks for the info Comment!

An idea popped into my head this afternoon which may work out better than importing.

Basically, I'm going to create an intranet web page using ASP and VB and then use Filemaker's Web Viewer to scrape the HTML from the page. I can tell VB to replace the end-of-line characters (chr(13) & chr(10)) with

's. From there I can have FM replace the

's with native Filemaker carriage returns.

There is a positive side effect to this method as well. I will not have to establish ODBC connections on each PC, only the web server.

If this method doesn't work out I may be back.

Thanks again for your help!

Becky

[comment]

Sounds like quite a detour. If you have this kind of control, perhaps you could make the external DB place a text or XML file for you in a known location. This could be imported without ODBC, and I believe that would be a lot easier than scraping HTML and parsing the result into records and fields.