answer files with filter

[Sarah Reichelt]

On 8/28/06, Martin Baxter <mb.ur at harbourhosting.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.


Thanks for the idea Martin, I'll try that and see how it works.

Sarah