opening txt files

[Kay C Lan]

What happens when you open the Pages converted file in TextEdit, does
it have the extra spaces? If so the problem is with the conversion
process from Pages, not with LC. If so you need to look at some of the
conversion options Pages offers and see if you can create the file
without the extra spaces.

If TextEdit opens the converted file just fine, then you may need to
download the free TextWrangler:

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

You can the select 'Show invisibles' from the 'T' toolbar icon.

If that doesn't reveal anything then use 'Zap Gremlins...' option in
the Text menu. Tick the boxes, use 'Replace with' and put in your own
distinct character. This will then highlight if there are any chars
that Pages is leaving behind that TextEdit is interpreting as
non-visible but LC is interpreting as a space.

If all else fails, assuming you have that selects the file and puts it
in a variable, I'll call tData, and you have a breakpoint immediately
after this, when you look at the variable tData it looks like this: H
E L L O...

So in the next line of you script after the breakpoint put:

--to determine the ASCII number of the bad character
put charToNum(char 2 of tData) into tBadChar

run your script again, when it stops at the breakpoint step once so
the above line is executed then check what is in tBadChar.

Hopefully it won't be 32 - which is what a regular space is. You
should be careful though, as there may be a bad character before the H
so maybe the number you get is for the H. Basically any number between
32-126 is probably valid. Anything outside this range is likely to be
the cause of your problem. So you may need to test char 1, char 2 and
char 3 just to make sure you are looking at the Bad character.

Once you've positively identified the ASCII value of the bad character
then simply add this further line of script after the last line you
added:

--replace bad ASCII with nothing
replace numToChar(tBadChar) with "" in tData

Again, if the number is 32 this means Pages is doing the wrong thing
with it's conversion and it's Page's problem, and it would be nigh
impossible for LC to repair this.

HTH

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 2:34 AM, NISHOK LOVE <nishok.love at virgin.net> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> I have a problem when I open .txt files in OSX, and I don't have much (any!) experience of reading files in LiveCode.
>
> I have a file originally written in Word on Windows. When I export it as a .txt from Word for Mac I just accept the default Mac OS encoding option (Western (Mac OS Roman) and it all works fine when I open the file in my LiveCode.
>
> But when I open the original file in Pages and export it as Plain Text, I get a different result. When I open that file in LiveCode I find a space has been inserted after every character. So Hello world becomes H e l l o   w o r l d.
>
> I guess this is a problem with the encoding, but how can my LiveCode understand what the incoming file's encoding is and respond accordingly? My LiveCode needs to be able to deal with any kind of text file...
>
> Thanks,
> Nishok Love
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode