Tab export produces "bad" first record?

[Seanjuan]

I'm pushing television program schedules out of an FM db and into a tab-deliniated file. The file is then imported into a digital video server for playback of our public access cable channels.

However, I rewrote the scripted export step when moving from FM6 to FM9 and even though I am exporting a tab text file that looks identical from FM versions, the import into the video server fails on the first record.

If I delete the first row of data in the tab file then the remaining hundreds of records import fine.

I'm stumped. I tried character format options, I made sure to have the data formatted identically for decimals, caps, etc, I've inspected the files in multiple text editors for character trash, I just can't sort it.

Anyone had a problem like that before?

[corn]

It's likely that your previous export format was either ASCII or Window-Latin or some other similar format that your software understood. What's failing, I bet, is that your export is now UTF and the first couple of bytes of the file are the Byte-Order Mark (BOM) that is confusing your software.

Check your export script step and look at the "Output file character set" setting. You will likely need to change it to "ASCII" or the like to fix the issue.

[Seanjuan]

Corn, thanks for the response, but I've tried character sets for Windows, ASCII, UTF, etc, and this is not the issue. I get the same results no matter what set I use.

I've thought it might have something to do with field names being included in the export but I don't think its possible to set the first record to contain field names in a tab file - nor does it look like it included field names when I inspect the tab file manualy.

[corn]

Have you looked at the file with a hex editor to see if there is anything different between it and the output of the solution under FMP 6? If so, what differences do you see?

[Seanjuan]

No dice, the files look identical in the hex app as well.

[corn]

Logically speaking, if the files look identical in a proper hex editor then they are identical. If one file consistently fails and the other consistently doesn't then they're not identical. That leaves for me three possibilities:

1) The hex editor is not displaying some information about the file that distinguishes it from the other.

2) There is some difference shown by the hex editor that you're not seeing as a difference

3) (Assuming Mac OS) There is some meta-data about the file (e.g. type/creator) being written by FMP 6 that is not written by FMP 9.

If you can rule out 1 and 3 then I'd suggest getting a different hex editor.

[comment]

Open TextWrangler (or BBEdit, if you have it) and select Search > Find Differences... Load the two files in the dialog box and hit Compare.

[_henry_]

Is there a good hex-editor for Windows or PC users?

What are they?

Thanks

[Søren Dyhr]

Back in ancient times when I owed a PC was debug.exe quite handy because you could pipe into it via a batch file ... but infinite wisdom has probably made them hide it away from the avarage user ... before the casual user accidentally made change to a single byte of data in the hard-drive's boot sector - making it completely useless beyond repair.

Update it havn't gone completly away:

http://technet.microsoft.com/da-dk/library/bb491040(en-us).aspx

--sd

[_henry_]

Thank you Søren for your information. Debug is MS-Dos Prompt based, right? Do you know if there is user-interactive based program for hex editor?

[Søren Dyhr]

I have no idea how punch packed it is, but simple googling made me make attention to this:

http://www.expertcomsoft.com/hex-edit-shots.htm

But UI solutions are hardly worth the bother if the process should be automated, it's just another layer of inconvenience - isn't it?

--sd

[Seanjuan]

My mulitple hex editors are showing me the same info on both files, they are the same. I used Text Wrangler to compare files and found some differences but only a few hundred records down - mostly they were additional well-formed records and import fine anyway.

What kind of metadata does Mac OS add? In addition to the leap from FM6, we did leap from 10.3.9 to 10.4.11. Would that change in OS be influencing how the files are created?