I'm new to importing data from a csv file. Here's my scenario; a
teacher submits a web form than contains the names of 10 students. I
get an email of the submission and the records are added to a csv. I
open the csv in Excel delimited with "|." The problem is that each
record in the csv has all 10 names on one row. I need each name to be a
separate record when imported. Thanks for any help.

tomstreet (AT) alltel (DOT) net wrote:

Rather strange way of creating a csv, but be that as it may, it has to be
fixed.

FileMaker imports a line as a record. There's nothing you can do to change
that.

As long as you're bringing it into Excel first, transpose it ("Paste
Special") there so that the row becomes a column and vice versa. Then open
it in FileMake,and your problem should be solved.

Matt

In article <QlPJe.3165$f.1794@trndny09>, I'm (AT) Witz (DOT) end says...
Doesn't sound like a CSV to me.

There is no official standards for .csv (leading to all sorts of
bastardizations involving quotes, escape characters, debates over
whether you actually need all the commas if the final fields on a line
are blank, etc).

The format really only has 2 rules:

1) Each line is a record
2) Each field is separated by a comma

That's it.

See rule #1.

If filemaker allowed you the kind of flexibility you're asking for it
wouldn't be a csv importer, it would be a general purpose text file
parser.

If its somethign you do regularly I'd write a quick little command line
utility to pre-process the so-called 'csv' into an actual csv. This is
likely to be remarkably easy, and you could probably contract a
programmer to do it in a few hours if you can't do it yourself.

Ideally of course, I'd want to fix the website so that it actually
outputs a csv.

-regards,
Dave

I agree with the others that the file is strangely formatted.

If you can't get that changed, though, another option is to bring the data
in "as is", into one or more text fields, and then use a script to parse the
text into the necessary fields.

I have a case, for instance, where users receive emails from their web site
(until we can get them using CWP). They paste the email into a notes field,
then press a button that parses out the values from the notes into the
requisite fields. The button script looks for patterns in the email to find
the first name, last name, address, phone, etc. The following calc, just by
way of example, identifies the line starting with the word "Name" and puts
it into the NameFirst field:

Let ( label = "Name:" ;

Middle (

Leads::A_t_Notes ;

Position ( "¶" & Leads::A_t_Notes ; "¶" & label ; 1 ; 1) + Length ( "¶" &
label ) ;

Position ( Leads::A_t_Notes ; "¶" ; Position ( "¶" & Leads::A_t_Notes ; "¶"
& label ; 1 ; 1) + Length ( "¶" & label ) ; 1 ) -
Position ( "¶" & Leads::A_t_Notes ; "¶" & label ; 1 ; 1) - Length ( "¶" &
label )

)
)

--

Shadenfroh
shadenfroh (AT) yahoo (DOT) com

<tomstreet (AT) alltel (DOT) net> wrote