exporting records to CSV without quotes

[AlisonHollier]

Hi I am trying to export some records to a CSV format to upload some bulk payments to my bank.

They however dont seem to allow quotes in the CSV format.

Is there any easy way to get rid of these without going through each record and deleting individually.

I am using filemaker 11

Thanks for any help

[comment]

See:

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

[TheTominator]

Is there any easy way to get rid of these...

It depends on how you define easy.

If you are looking for a setting or checkbox to turn off the quoting, then no. The built-in export feature uses the standard quotes around each exported field to accommodate the situation where the field contains a comma.

If the recipient requires no quotes then the recipient must also require that no commas appear within the field data. This provides you with some workarounds.

Workaround (1)

Create a new calculation field defined in a specific way and export just that one field in tab-delimited format.

Workaround (2)

Load the CSV file that FileMaker generates into a spreadsheet or other program and have it strip the quotes when saving a new copy.

I'll leave you to explore your options for Workaround (2).

Workaround (1) is fairly simple to do.

myExportedCalc =

myField1 & "," & myField2 & "," & myField3 & "," & myField4

Continue the pattern for the many fields you want to export in that CSV row.

Then export the field myExportedCalc as a tab-delimited file. Since there is only one field exported, there are no tabs. The resulting file has commas between each field value because you put them there.

This simple method has two pitfalls.

Your field data must not contain a comma.

Your field data must not contain a line break. (This won't break the output file, but it may confuse the recipient since line breaks in FileMaker fields will be converted to "vertical tabs".)

Both of these can be solved in the calculation.

If myField4 for example is a text field which might contain a comma or a line break, use the following variation.

myField1 & "," & myField2 & "," & myField3 & "," &

Substitute(myField4; [","; " "];["¶";" "])

This will replace the commas and line breaks with spaces. (You can use other characters instead of spaces, e.g. a semicolon, slash, pipe, or a hyphen may add to the readability.)

Edited October 1, 2010 by Guest

[AlisonHollier]

Thanks so much that works perfectly.!

now on to the next thing : Im sure there'll be many more questions to come

thanks Again