answer files with filter

[Martin Baxter]

Sarah Reichelt wrote:
> On 8/25/06, Sarah Reichelt <sarah.reichelt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The "answer file" command usually gets me thoroughly confused, but
>> this time, I'm not sure it is able to do what I want.
>>
>> I want to allow the user to select a text file, but it has to be a
>> text file with a name like "Slot45.txt". The number will vary, but it
>> has to start with "Slot" and have the ".txt".
>>
>> Is this possible? I can get it to limit to text files, but is it
>> possible to limit the available files to only text files which start
>> with "Slot"?
> 
> Thanks for the replies, Sean & Rob. I need to keep the files as text
> files so they can be imported into a spreadsheet later, so a custom
> file type is not an option.
> 
> I guess I'll build my own file selector. In the meantime I've gone the
> lazy way and allowed selection of any text file, with a file name
> check after selection to catch any non-matching files. Since it's only
> for in-house use (& mainly by me), this will be OK for now.
> 
> Thanks,
> Sarah

Just a thought,

If your files are tab/return delimited, it might be useful to give them 
a .tsv suffix. This is a more correct suffix for such files than .txt 
anyway. Since almost nobody actually does this, it would amount, in 
practice, to a custom file type suffix. In my experience, Microsoft 
spreadsheets understand this type. OpenOffice however does not, it opens 
them in Write (doh). So you should test with your preferred spreadsheet.

Martin Baxter