Importing Tab Delimited File with quotes

[FM Newbie]

Greetings,

I have an extremely large tab delimited file. When I drag & drop it onto Filemaker, it loads fine, but all the data shows up after import with quotes in each field, like:

"John" "Smith" "1234 Mainstreet" "Yourtown" "NY" "10234"

How can I either:

1) reimport so the quotes vanish

2) strip out quotes after the import

(note: If I open one of these txt files in Excel, and use the import wizard, selecting 'tab delimited", it goes into Excel perfectly)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[Lee Smith]

Your fields are what you see when the file is a . csv, comma-separated text file, and is imported as a tab file.

Try importing it as a comma separated file instead.

Lee

[FM Newbie]

Thank you for you rapid reply.

1 question: I am letting FMP decide when I drag & drop the file onto FMP. How do I tell it to try csv?

1 comment: when I tell Excel to use csv, it imports the whole record into a single cell ... that's why I was thinking it was not csv.

[FM Newbie]

OK ... I changed the file suffix to csv, and now the quotes are gone, but all the data is stuffed into one field (like what Excel did).

Any more suggestions?

[Lee Smith]

I look at your sample data

"John" "Smith" "1234 Mainstreet" "Yourtown" "NY" "10234"

and there isn't any delimitor in it. i.e. no tab, or comma, so we are not seeing the RAW example.

Can you post an example of it so we can see what it looks like before you process it?

BTW, when you drop a file on the FileMaker icon, you should get a dialog box, that you can select the File Format. It probably is defaulting to FileMaker, or Tab-Separated now.

Lee

Edited October 11, 2009 by Guest