Another Revolution Success Story

[Alex Tweedly]

At 18:02 28/06/2004 -0400, Troy Rollins wrote:


>On Jun 28, 2004, at 5:40 PM, Kurt Kaufman wrote:
>
>>A physician in our area had a need for an application which could easily 
>>import patient data from a text file (multiple rows of comma-delineated 
>>data).  It was a simple task, using Revolution, to open the file and read 
>>the data to a field.  Subsequently a "model" card was cloned and the 
>>appropriate data sent to various fields on each card. Over a thousand 
>>records were created this way in a few minutes.The only stumbling block 
>>involved my forgetting that a standalone cannot modify itself.  No matter 
>>though; I merely created an invisible "starter app" that immediately 
>>opened a data stack in the data folder.
>>The application works "as advertised".
>>The doctor was impressed that it was possible to do this in a few hours!
>
>String handling apps DO seem to be Rev's forte.

yes, string handling is pretty good - but I'm surprised that Rev has no 
built-in support for CSV files. They are a pretty common interchange 
format, but handling the variations commonly found makes it non-trivial to 
do this properly - quoted fields, delimiter in quoted fields, escaped or 
doubled quotes within a field, etc.

Has anyone written and contributed a library to avoid others having to 
"roll-your-own" ?

(*) - I should probably say "appears to have no built-in support" - there 
may be something that I just can't find in the docs.


-- Alex.
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