At 10:51 -0500 12/5/11, Dick Griffin wrote: >Hi Kendall, > >Thanks for the response. I'm opening an HTML doc in Excel (for Mac), saving >it as Tab Delimitated , Editing it in BBEdit, saving it, and re-opening it in >Excel Mac. > >I tried to save out of Excel as CVS, edit, and reopen and lost all of the hard >returns. > >I just bought BBEdit because I had the same problem in TextWrangler, and >couldn't figure it out. Am new to BBEdit, today.
Excel - as least my version 2001 - has an annoying feature that if you read a cvs file or otherwise muck with its column separators it remembers and assumes you always want to do that. The result is that a copy and paste into BBedit of a batch of data shows up tab separated in the text editor but when you save as a file Excel goes back to the last choice you made - text to columns fro instance. Something to try is a simple copy from BBedit and a subsequent paste into Excel. Copy and paste seem not to get involved with "helpfully" saved preferences about column delimiters. Be aware that BBEdit does all of its editing in 16 bits per character in unicode with Mac classic line ends - 0x000D - . All that gets cleaned up when you copy into a clipboard or save the file. But you had better specify the line endings you want at the time. BBedit will make them all the same regardless of what was in the original file. You might also be surprised at how easy it is to muck with HTML docs in BBEdit. Regular expressions, after you climb the learning curve, are pretty good at getting rid of HTML and leaving the data you want. It almost as good as plain old perl. And. . . CSV files need to have embedded commas escaped, usually by quoting the entire content of a cell. The standards either don't exist or are widely abused with some software quoting all content of every comma separated cell. It's a mess. Accidentally quoted tabs and line ends can drive one crazy. -- --> A fair tax is one that you pay but I don't <-- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en> If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
