I am exporting a tab delimited file from my Mac running FMPA 9.03 to a Windows 2003 server. When I open the file on my Mac I see:

100208

"13334","A"

"13217","A"

This is exactly what I need it to look like.

When I open the same file on a PC with Notepad I see:

100208☐"13334","A"☐"13217","A"☐

(NOTE: I have substituted a different character to show the boxes that I see in the export. I think the actual box in the export is the escape character getting poorly translated.)

I have tried changing the encoding of the tab-separated text to all of the options in the export window (Windows ANSI, ASCII DOS, Mac, Unicode 16 and Unicode 8.) Nothing works.

Is this just a function of FileMaker not using a standard enough escape character? I have tried doing an export with a different database and a single text field (the field I was exporting above is a calculation field that combines a couple pieces of info) to no avail.

I'm wondering if I will just need to run the export from FileMaker running on a Windows machine.

Thanks in advance for any help!

NOTE: I have attached the file to this post.

test.txt

Please zip your file before posting, otherwise we cannot be sure we are getting it intact. BTW, it looks like a comma-separated file, not tab delimited. The boxes you see are (probably) carriage-return characters that separate between records. AFAIK, when you export from a Mac, you'll ALWAYS get CR characters as record delimiters, regardless of your choice of output file character set.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Common_problems

http://www.websiterepairguy.com/articles/os/crlf.html

Thanks so much for the reply. Sorry about not zipping it. I will make sure to do that in the future.

I should have explained my export a little better. The only way I could format the output to look exactly like we need it to look (we have to suck this exported data into a different system that needs very specific input) was to export one calculation field per record. My first line needed to have the date with no quotation marks. The lines that followed however DID need to be coma separated. What I did was create a calculation field that combines the data for lines 2+ to LOOK like a comma separated file.

Thanks for the links! It looks like I'm going to have to do the export from FM running on a Windows machine.

Thanks again!

A quick follow up question after a little more research.

Would it be possible for me to add the LF after the CR from within FileMaker?

Thanks again!

For this type of control over the exported file parameters you should look into exporting as XML and formatting the output with a stylesheet - see, for example:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/191976/

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/196866/

Edited October 3, 200817 yr by Guest

Is this the REPEATING FIELD delimeter?

I think FMP uses ASCII 29 as the repeating field delimeter.