Parse text help

[MachineMan]

Greetings all and thanks in advance for any help. I'm very new to FMP and am trying to setup a database at work for customer contact managment. Mainly it's just to make my life easier because my employer dosnt have any system in place and I've been given the wonderfull task of making cold call inquiries. FUN...

Anyway so far I've got things workeing pretty well I can create a record search even set up a special field to make checking the company names against those already in the database so I wouldnt end up with too many duplicates and didnt have to retype the company name over and over. Any way that's beside the point.

What I'm looking to do now is even more to make the data entry part easier.

at the moment I lookup business info online for example with yellowbook.com I then just copy the results from yellowbook to a global field in my database window so that I can parse the info out into my database.

now what I'm doing is because the way the info copies from yellowbook it's real easy for me to clean it up real fast and have a readable address list which ends up looking like

Company Name

Address

City

State

Zip

Phone

Website (sometimes)

then repeats same 7 lines every time sometimes only 6 lines because of no website but it's all one long qlobal field

I then just copy past the info starting at the top into a new record for each company. what I want to do is after I have the global field list I'd like to just clcik a button or copy all 7 lines of an contact into a new field and parse the infor into the coresponding seperate fields.

I know this can be done but I just dont know how to do it.

thank you for readiung this and any help is very much appreciated.

also please try to keep it simple I'm VERY NEW to this and am still having to look up deffinitions on functions and stuff and piecing together an understanding on paramiters for stuff. So if ya can explain it to me like I'm a 5 year old YOUR THE BEST. but I do catch on quick.

[comment]

I'd like to just clcik a button or copy all 7 lines of an contact into a new field and parse the infor into the coresponding seperate fields.

After you have 7 (or 6) lines in a global text field, you can run a script like:

Set Field [ Contacts::Company Name ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 1 ) ]

Set Field [ Contacts::Address ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 2 ) ]

Set Field [ Contacts::City ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 3 ) ]

...

[MachineMan]

After you have 7 (or 6) lines in a global text field, you can run a script like:

Set Field [ Contacts::Company Name ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 1 ) ]

Set Field [ Contacts::Address ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 2 ) ]

Set Field [ Contacts::City ; GetValue ( Contacts::gTextfield ; 3 ) ]

...

This worked exactly the way I wanted it too THANK YOU VERY MUCH just one question though.

When I made the script I could not find the function " GetValue ( ) " where did that one come from looking through all the Get functions there is no GetValue listed so I was a little confused for a moment but typed it in and it worked. If i had know about that function I probobly could have gotten this to work myself grrr.. guess I've got some more studing to do to find out functions that are there but not there if ya know what I mean lol

Once again THANK YOU for the help works great

Thomas

[comment]

I could not find the function " GetValue ( ) " where did that one come from looking through all the Get functions there is no GetValue listed

GetValue() is not a Get function - it's a Text function. All the Get functions have Get() as the function name, and differ only by the parameter's name - so technically, there's only one Get() function.

[MachineMan]

GetValue() is not a Get function - it's a Text function. All the Get functions have Get() as the function name, and differ only by the parameter's name - so technically, there's only one Get() function.

Thank you again I found the function under text functions. Just going to have to learn where the diffrent functions are practice and keep at it.

Thank you for the pointers

Thomas

[FMPierce]

I have been using FM for about a year and my dad knows FM really well and I still have about a hundred functions that I don't know, so don't feel bad, calculations are hard…Maybe that's why i like them so much, your always learning something new.

[bcooney]

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This topic has been moved from "Database Schema & Business Logic → Custom Functions" to "Database Schema & Business Logic → Calculation Engine (Define Fields)".