text file database, moving from Mac OsX to windows

[Klaus Major]

Bonjour Phillipe,

> Hello,
>  i'm sorry if i might be unpolite, it is not a will but just may be 
> unexperience, i use to be lonesome!
> so if I say or do something wrong, please tell me, teach me.
>
> Well this is my problem:
> i'm a french radiologist, and i develop under hypercard since 1989.
> recently i switched to Revolution (what a wonder!) a began to develop 
> a stack, designed to be a professionnal rendez vous planner.
> The deal was to make a multi-User data base, text based with a single 
> card stack front user interface.
> Now it is OK under Mac OSX for single User, and i believe for multi 
> Users also, but it is diificult to test with a single computer.
> so I compiled for windows to begin the tests, single user before multi 
> users.
> After minor corrections there was no problem to run under windows OS, 
> but there I encountered a real surprise: the immediate corruption of 
> the text file
> by the Windows interface, probably because of writing file at the 
> wrong place.
> At least the inscriptions in the text file are not same as under 
> MacOSX, because in one case it works correctly and in the other it is 
> awful !!!
> Is there a different way to count the place of the first char on one 
> platform or other?
> Is there a difference in the length of a chain (for instance one 
> platform count the returns and the other not?)
> I don't understand!
> if someone knows about that problem, please give me a hand, because 
> i'm a bit bothered about it now!
> if someone wants to see the stack, no problem, i give it, it was a 
> funny work and runs pretty well under Mac (however i have to say that 
> it is very specific to our organisation)

welcome to the wonderful world of crossplatform development :-)

There is a difference between mac and win in the way text (strings) are 
encoded,
which is especially important in a language with umlauts and accents 
like french!

I guess the text is created on a mac and "only" displayed on windows, 
right?

In that case you would have to convert the text from mac to ISO 
encoding to display it correctly
on windows...

I do something like this, since i also create text on my mac, but will 
display it on windows, too...

I use this function to convert "mac" text for each according platform:

function mac_or_win tText
   if the platform contains "Mac" then
     return tText
     ## we are on a mac an can display the text without having to convert
   else
      return MacToIso(tText)
      ## we are on win or *nix and so need to tranlate from Mac to ISO 
encoding!
   end if
end mac_or_win


And then i use it like:
...
put mac_or_win(line 1 to 3 of fld "mactext") into fld "display"
...


Hope that helps.

> before all i thank you for your help
> Philippe Giraudet

Regards

Klaus Major
klaus at major-k.de
http://www.major-k.de