Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited download

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Ugh, that third step is ugly to require the user to do that. Will it 
work okay in MS Access if you skip that part, will Access be okay with 
just \n?

If not, I might actually try sniffing the OS from the user-agent and 
converting line-endings to appropriate for that OS before delivering the 
file; making people do that extra step would make me sad.

On 1/12/2011 10:34 AM, Doran, Michael D wrote:
For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or
"\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.
That's been my experience, too.

These are my instructions to staff for downloading a delimited text file from 
one of our (Unix) web servers to their PC:

1) Right-click and select "Save Target (or Link) As..."
2) Save the file in desired directory
3) Once the file is saved, open it in WordPad and re-save
4) Optional: import the file into MS Access

After step 3, they can also view it okay in Notepad.  Opening and re-saving the 
file in WordPad apparently converts the Unix line-endings to the Windows 
line-endings.

-- Michael


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of
Gabriel Farrell
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 12:09 AM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited
download

For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or
"\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.

Further reading:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vclanguage/thread/cba503b1-a0e2-
4a64-a970-f735c5bc1c90
http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=9069

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Ken Irwin<kir...@wittenberg.edu>  wrote:
Jonathan's questions were right on target. I was opening the files in the
standard MS Notepad editor, and it was not observing line breaks. When I went
to go open the files in MiniTab they were just fine. (Changing the files to
.txt and text/plain did *not* fix the problem in Notepad, and I do wonder what
it would take to make that program happy, but in this case it doesn't much
matter.)
Thanks for the help
Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 3:41 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited
download
line breaks don't appear when you view it with what software?

Can you have your browser save it to disk after it prompts you to do so,
and open with a reliable text editor you know how to use and confirm if
\n is really still in the file or not?

If you are viewing it in your web brower, then your web browser is
probably deciding to display it as HTML. The line breaks are probably
still there, the web browser is just displaying as HTML. Web browsers
aren't great places to view text.  If you are viewing it after saving it
to disk, then your web browser probably won't know to display as text
unless the filename ends in ".txt".  If you are viewing it without
saving to disk (but then why are you using
Content-Disposition:attachment?), then make sure you're still setting
the content-type appropriately; and you may need to make the filename
end in .txt anyway.

The line breaks are probably still there, your web browser is just
rendering the file as html rather than txt, is my guess.

On 1/11/2011 3:29 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
Hi all,

I've got a dataset that I'm trying to make exportable for MiniTab, etc.
It's tab-delimited and lines end with "\n".
When I serve it up as "text/plain" and view it in my web browser, it works
just fine and all the line breaks are in the right places.
When I send the header to make it a downloadable "attachment":
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="categories.tab"
Then there are no line breaks at all - it's all one line, and the line-
breaks don't appear.
I tried "\r" instead, and that didn't work either.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong here?

Thanks
Ken