Is there an easy way to remove extra spaces, line endings to make the
field look better and conform to the rest of the file. Mac. OS X

Railman wrote:
This was just discussed here last week. Please check the archives via
Google.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg (818) 883-2846
FM Pro Solutions Los Angeles, California

FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
Associate Member, FileMaker Solutions Alliance

Railman wrote:

Just to give you an idea what to look for, it's the Trim ( Text )
function. There was a considerable thread that has continued right up to
yesterday.

Matt

In article <2005071117472516807%railman@sasktelnet>, Railman
<railman (AT) sasktel (DOT) net> wrote:

There is no way to reformat entered text within the same field the user
enters it ... at least not until FileMaker 7 which apparently has some
extra formatting features, but I'm not sure how those work.

But you can use a second Calculation field to reformat the data for use
on other layouts. Here's a version for FileMaker 7 and older.


Note:
Unfortunately, thanks to code-mangling by text-based forums, I'm not
exactly sure what all the whitespace characters the Substitute
function(s) at the beginning is meant to be removing.

Substitute(
text;
[ "*"; "" ]; Space
[ " "; "" ]; ???
[ " *"; "" ]; Tab
[ "¶"; "" ] Carriage Return
);

Obviously this can easily be modified to remove whatever characters you
want it to anyway.




FILEMAKER 7
-----------
This calculation is by Debi Fuchs from the Cleveland Consulting support
(www.clevelandconsulting.com) if you're using FileMaker 7.


// Supertrim( Text )
// ======================================
// Remove any leading and trailing whitespace from a string of text

Let(
[
// Determine result of removing ALL whitespace.
t2 =
Substitute(
Text;
[ "*"; "" ];
[ " "; "" ];
[ " *"; "" ];
[ "¶"; "" ]
);

// Find position of first non-ws character in original text.
first_char = Position( Text; Left( t2; 1 ); 0; 1 );

// Find position of last non-ws character in original text.
last_char =
Position( Text; Right( t2; 1 ); Length( Text ); -1 )
];

// If any non-whitespace characters exist, then return
// appropriate substring of original text.
Case(
first_char;
Middle( Text; first_char; last_char - first_char + 1 )
)
)





OLDER FILEMAKER VERSIONS (should also work in FileMaker 7)
------------------------
Squashing Debi Fuhs' method above into one older version calculation
gives the long-winded looking:

TrimmedText {Calculation, Text Result}
= If(
Position(Text, Left(Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(
Substitute(Text, "*", ""), " ", ""), " ", ""), "¶",
""), 1), 0, 1) = 1,

Middle(Text, Position(Text, Left(Substitute(Substitute(
Substitute(Substitute(Text, "*", ""), " ", ""), " ",
""), "¶", ""), 1), 0, 1), Position(Text, Right(
Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(Text, "*",
""), " ", ""), " ", ""), "¶", ""), 1), Length(Text),
-1) - Position(Text, Left(Substitute(Substitute(
Substitute(Substitute(Text, "*", ""), " ", ""), " ",
""), "¶", ""), 1), 0, 1) + 1),
********
"")

WHEW!



Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)

Harry:

All those calcs below are lovely, but why jump through so many hoops to
avoid using the Trim function?

Incidentally, once you have a suitable calc, instead of saddling yourself
with a caloc field that is always the one that contains your real data,
why not just run a replace with calculation on the original field? Stamp
out the white space one time and be done with it. If new incoming data
always has white space, this can be automated. Import the new stuff, your
file now has a found set of what was just imported, run the replace. Make
it part of the import script and you'll never know it's happening.

Steve Brown


In article <120720051812447403%helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com>, Helpful
Harry <helpful_harry (AT) nom (DOT) de.plume.com> wrote:

In article
<eyebrown-1207050749270001 (AT) 216-10-173-70 (DOT) earthlink.wispnet.net>,
eyebrown (AT) mindspring (DOT) com wrote:

The Trim function ONLY removes leading / trailing space characters - it
won't remove any leading / training carriage returns, tabs or other
characters. For all of those you need to use something like Debi Fuchs'
calculation.



Once you've got the calculation you can of course use it in various
ways via scripts (perhaps a closing script which uses the calculation
to replace the original field's data when exiting the file), including
automating imported data. Of course, if you going to script it then you
don't really need the calculations at all since you could simply
perform a loop to go through the field removing the extra characters.

BUT there's no way to "automate" user entered data with the extra
characters ... other than continually beating them over the head with a
wet sponge until they learn not to add them. ;o)



Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)