Importing Text, Excel style - bumped

[Alex Tweedly]

mfstuart at cox.net wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>*** Any other takers on this? There must be something out there that simulates this feature. ***
>
>========================================================
>I have a columnar formatted text file that I'd like to "import" into a SQL
>database, using RunRev on WinXP.
>
>I'd like the RunRev program to have features similar to Excel's Text Import
>Wizard:
>
>- open file dialog
>- raw display of first 100 or so lines of chosen text file
>- allow user to define the column breaks
>- based on users column breaks, read text file and put into a table
>  field for final approval to import into database
>- read into SQL table
>
>I've managed to develop the first two steps in the wizard, but I need help
>with the third and fourth steps.
>
>Especially the part where the user defines the distinction of column
>placements - Excel's "set field widths (column breaks)".
>
>That is, how to handle the placement and movement of the vertical line for
>column breaks.
>  
>
I'm not at all familiar with Excel's import wizard (and don't have a 
copy of Excel). Is there anything similar in Open Office ? I don't see a 
likely candidate, but then I'm not sure what I'm looking for :-)

I'm *assuming* that this only allows you to defined fixed number of 
characters in each field (e.g. old-fashioned punched card style).

I would take a look at the AltFldHeader plug-in from Altuit  - see
   http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/altPluginCover/About.htm
and then follow the "Downloads" link to get details of the plug-ins they 
have available. I think this, combined with a fixed-width font, would 
allow your users to set the column widths as they want - and then some 
simple arithmetic to convert from pixel-widths back to character widths 
should give you number of characters per field.


Then a simple loop like
   repeat for each line L in theFileData
      repeat with i = 1 to numColumns
         put char start[i] to end[i] of L into field[i]
      end repeat
   end repeat

SQL is outside my scope :-)


-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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