At 7:17 am -0800 03/04/02, Andrew O. Mellinger wrote: >I would suggest using Mac::Glue to open each file in Appleworks and >do a save as. Let Appleworks works do the work for you.
This is a valid comment but there are two complications - 1] the legacy version of Claris 4I have, is a Mac classic app, which will produce a glue dictionary when dropped on the requisite droplet, but it doesn't have any of the XTND filters, so it can only save in ..cwd format and it can't open any other kind of file. 2] AppleWorks can translate the .cwd files, but it's a carbon app and therefor doesn't have a classic Mac res fork, meaning MacGlue can't get at it's applescript dictionary which will be in a ._res file somewhere. > > >I have a folder of several hundred files mixed Claris/Apple works. I >>want to merge these files and save them as ASCII text. I could use >>applescript I suppose to get these apps to do the job but I haven't >>used apple script since about OS 7 and to be honest I prefer perl. >> >>What's bugging me is Claris/Apple works files have some kind of >>binary info packed around the text content which - >>varies in length >>varies in content and in particular doesn't use any special constants >>to delinieate where the text content begins and ends >> >>The only method I've found which works with any consistency involves >>using tr// to remove any non ascii chars, however it's not perfect as >>it leaves, obviously, binary bits which do infact match an ascii >>value so I end up with lines like. >> >>AG AJBbnab >>jhavgfavThis is the start of the file >>..... >>this is the endzsgFahhiobakljbaKVBHDK >> >>Before I get into making a regex to clean this up, which at this >>point looks like I'm going to have to define which groups of >>consonants can legally come together, I'm casting about for >>alternative approaches or pointers to and/either what the binary data >>is for (I'm assuming window position, font info and save path etc) or >>how the internal Claris/Apple works filters actually filter this guff >>out when they save a file as ASCII text. > >
