I'm having a problem with hidden ¶s

it seems like some kind of defect in filemaker, and i'm wondering if there's a way to work around it.

text calculations keep producing results with hidden ¶s

or sometimes they're even there when i import or copy and paste.

these hidden ¶s can't be detected in calculations!

for example

Substitute ( ______ ; ¶ ; "")

will not even get rid of them

they also aren't visible when you are looking at the text field in browse mode,

but if you copy and paste the text into notepad, you'll see the hidden ¶s as real line breaks.

anyone know how to fix this?

even if i could just detect them, somehow, with a calculation, that would solve a lot.

(if i copy and paste from the real text into the calculation it doesn't even detect it)

also, these hidden ¶s get treated as real ¶s when you make a value list from a field.

A file showing the problem would be helpful. It sounds like your data contains some non-printing control characters.

i think they are invisible control characters.

is there anyway to detect those in calculations?

i attached an example file

(download it and change the extension from ".txt" to ".fp7")

the invisible ¶ is in field a in between "Sen. " and "Aanestad"

the value list of field a, becomes:

Aanestad

Sen.

and there would seem to be no way to fix that (so that "Sen. Aanestad", for example, would become one value) (except maybe by using the filter fuction, though that feels kind of draconian)

example407a.txt

Yes, that's a non-printing character*. You can paste it into a global field, and use Substitute ( text ; gCharacter ; "" ) to remove it. This is assuming that other records do not contain OTHER non-printable characters - otherwise you would need to use Filter() with a list of ALL allowed characters.

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P.S. Please use a zipped file next time.

EDIT:

(*) I am not able to reliably identify the character, but it's most likely a Unix line feed.