NULL characters and sorting

[Jim Ault]

When using the filter command and foreign data I always replace null  
with empty (or space, depending).  Hypercard used '00' to be the end  
char of strings in its stack structure.  In the days of recovering  
from hard drive corruption, I did many scans in hex for stack data  
recovery.

Some systems will add a null to web pages and since they are ignored  
by browsers, no worries until you capture and try to work with the  
characters.

Jim Ault
Las Vegas


On Mar 20, 2009, at 8:42 AM, Paul Looney wrote:

> Richard,
> Thanks for the insight.
> Most of this archived data had been imported from the previous  
> HyperCard system. We've now done many such imports and this is the  
> only customer with this problem.
> Another customer, at the other end of the country, had a different  
> problem; blank spaces in fields. For example, the description field  
> might have 25 lines; lines 1 to 4 were correct, lines 5 to 9 were  
> missing, and lines 10 to 25 were correct. The "hole" was not always  
> in the same fields or the same lines. We traced this back to them  
> using AppleWorks and MS Word to write notes - which they had then  
> pasted into the notes field on the HC-based program.
> We occasionally get a NULL in the current, Rev-based, system (about  
> one in six months). We have checked the code but not found a source.  
> Obviously the user can not type a NULL.
> I will vote for both 7823 and, especially 7824.