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Ascii Export Field Quote Char

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:32 pm
by jim wood
Guys,

I've been having some export troubles for a while. Within a cube we have a free text field. As users do they've used and abused this field. We've got tabs, quotes, pipes you name it in there. Currently the export is tab delimited and the tabs within the fields is causing us a problem. We have 2 choices:

1) Scan each field for a tab and replace it
2) Set the field quote to a character that wont be found within the text field

We've ruled out option 1) due to the way we're having to export. (Using a while statement to put all elements in to columns.) So we're looking in to options 2). The problem is that AsciiOutput does not include the extended Ascii character set as far as I'm aware so we're struggling to find an Ascii character that will fit the bill.

Have any of you hit the same problem and do you have any suggestions for the best Ascii character to use?

Thanks,

Jim.

Re: Ascii Export Field Quote Char

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:49 pm
by Alan Kirk
jim wood wrote: The problem is that AsciiOutput does not include the extended Ascii character set as far as I'm aware so we're struggling to find an Ascii character that will fit the bill.
I don't believe that ASCIIOutput does, but I would have thought that TextOutput with a Unicode character set would. I've never had to use it, but the docs suggest that it's viable. Either that or use the Code function to create a split between the fields using some completely obscure character that would never be in the input.