How to remove FMP's added blank lines

[K1200]

After a long and frustrating afternoon of trying to unravel what FileMaker was doing to my imported text fields, I’ve arrived at a solution that I’d like to share. This involves text files imported using the Import Folder option. And from what I can tell, this applies to Windows only.

After importing, all text paragraphs had one or two extra blank lines appended to them. I tried the various “usual” methods for removing extra carriage returns from the end of text fields. None of them worked -- because what FileMaker had done (for reasons known only to them) was add a combination Carriage Return + Line Feed every time it saw a Carriage Return in the import stream. I found this after I resorted to displaying the imported text with a Hex Editor. I’ve attached a snippet of the analyzed file for reference. I can find no relevant information in the documentation.

Once I isolated the data case, a simple calculation cleaned it up -- “made it normal” again:

Substitute (Table::Field ; Char(13) & Char(10) ; “” )

Maybe someone will put together a white paper on “Importing and Exporting Text with FileMaker”. Between character set differences, OS conventions, XML style sheets and FileMaker's quirks, this most basic and common way to transfer information is all too complicated. Judging from the history of posts on this forum, a lot of time has been wasted already because the unknowns are so high. And FileMaker isn't talking -- not really.

I hope this helps whoever decides to write that paper!