exporting QR code encoded data

[willieg]

This may be related to other topics. If so I apologize, but I haven't found an answer.

 

I'm a developer working in cross-channel marketing campaigns using variable data. I'm on a Mac (mountain lion) using FMP 12 Advanced.

 

Variable QR code encoded data is generated for me on windows.net systems by my microsite hosting provider. The encoded data for a QR code consists of a string of characters followed by a vertical tab or line break, follow by another string and a vertical tab or line break and so on. I import the data into FMP to do further data work, export the data to a .mer or xlsx file. A variable data print file is produced using HP's Smart Stream Designer, which expects a tab delimited or csv file, which I create from the .mer or xlsx file. I'm using a QR code font to convert the encoded data to a scannable QR code at the print run stage. It's much faster than exporting and printing a QR code image.

 

Problem is, the vertical tab or line break in the QR code data isn't preserved correctly in the export file to .mer, .tab, or csv. When I look at the file in BBEdit (or any other editor on my mac) the line break character in the QR code data is an upside-down question mark. Unusable encoded QR code. I can post-process the file in BBEdit to fix this, but it's an extra step, data files are in excess of 40K records with several fields, and post-processing that way seems to me to be potentially error-prone.

 

Has anyone else run into this or have any suggestions for me?

 

Thanks in advance.

Bill

 

Here's an example of an encoded QR code:

AHEEEHAPBNJDNJEOKKFKMPAHEEEHA
BNFFFNBPFGELJDAOFDMGJPBNFFFNB
AONDGAFBHFGPFHAAHGMOMCLKDPBDG
GDMGAKFNHEIEOGEJHPLMAMCBJJMLA

[comment]

Problem is, the vertical tab or line break in the QR code data isn't preserved correctly in the export file to .mer, .tab, or csv.

 

The vertical tab is preserved; the line break is converted to a vertical tab. That's because Filemaker reserves the line break as record separator. The upside question mark you see in BBEdit is the (otherwise invisible) vertical tab. 

 

If you need to preserve the in-field line breaks, you can either export the field contents (one record at a time, and the result is UTF-16 encoded which not all applications can handle) or export as XML using a custom XSLT stylesheet  to produce a text file of your own specification. Note, however, that a vertical tab is not legal XML character, so you might have to standardize on one or the other.