In article <11cuba352e7cff (AT) corp (DOT) supernews.com>,
howard (AT) antispahm (DOT) fmprosolutions.com says...
to have you here, as you seem very knowledgable about things. As
Glad to hear he's still around. I'm suddenly curious about these other
more developer-oriented lists... sounds like good reading material.

Of course I'm not FSA if that's a pre-req... I have solid enough work
that I don't need it to generate revenue, and at the time I took (and
passed) the test (devcon in palm desert [year??]) it really felt like
more of a business development vehicle than a technical resource
vehicle, so i never signed up. I'd have let it lapse anyways the last
few years though regardless.

Vancouuver, Canada

Here we go - a quick Google search turns up a solution. )

Debi Fuchs has already solved this problem over on the Cleveland
Consulting support (www.clevelandconsulting.com) forums for those 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 )
* * )
)


It looks good to me, but I don't have FileMaker 7 to test it on (of
course it could be squashed down into a single calculation for use on
older versions too).

Since it doesn't use the "Words" versions of Left and Middle functions
it should handle any trailing punctuation symbols correctly as well.


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

Substitute(
* text;
* [ "*"; "" ]; Spaces
* [ " "; "" ]; ???
* [ "* *"; "" ]; Tabs
* [ "¶"; "" ] Carriage Returns
);

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




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

You wrote: > This is a bug,imo. FM3/4/5/6 did it correctly.

But I found: From the HelpFile of FM6 I copied the following.

Returns the supplied text, stripped of all leading and trailing spaces.
Tip Use Trim to remove unneeded spaces when you convert files from other
programs or systems that require a fixed number of characters per field, or
to remove spaces accidentally typed during data entry.

This supports what I seem to remember. Trim has never done anything else
then removing spaces.

Ursus

in article 42d104da$0$82405$dbd43001 (AT) news (DOT) wanadoo.nl, ursus.kirk at
secret (AT) nowhere (DOT) com wrote on 7/10/05 4:16 AM:


In order to deal with multiple returns, you have to use a multiple
Substitute and the "¶" (paragraph symbol, AKA as the PILCROW), such as shown
in this formula posted by Bob Weaver on Oct 23, 2003, here:
http://www.fmforums.com/threads/show...6&Number=85271

which I'm quoting here:

Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(Substitute(InputT ext,
"¶¶¶¶¶¶¶","¶"),
"¶¶¶","¶"),
"¶¶","¶"),
"¶¶","¶")

This formula will convert from 2 to 41 contiguous ¶'s to a single ¶.

Lee

For FM7 this can be simplified into

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

Ursus

in article 42d1a549$0$3471$dbd4d001 (AT) news (DOT) wanadoo.nl, ursus.kirk at
secret (AT) nowhere (DOT) com wrote on 7/10/05 3:46 PM:

Hi Ursus,

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know this had changed until about an
hour after I posted the other one. However, I also didn't pick up the
version of the 42 is using.

I'm so glad to see this improved, it has been a real PIA ganging the
substitutes in prior versions. Unfortunately, I'm still doing most of my
developing in v6 and earlier.

Lee

In article <slrndd7l06.pdp.t-use (AT) ID-685 (DOT) user.individual.de>, t-
use (AT) gmx (DOT) net says...
If we had regular expressions 90% of the parsing questions here would be
trivial.