Mike
I hope I do not have everyone mixed up on what I am trying to do?
You may know this already but I am trying to combine 2 Varchar
columns with formatted data. I am not really joining files. My code
sets the lookup Varchar data to a Variable then Updates the other Table.
It seems that Varchar variables only hold raw text and can not hold Bold or
red text
without converting it to the formatting gibberish and that gibberish breaks
the Update
command.
Thanks for all the help
Marc
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From: "MikeB" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 5:51 PM
To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Subject: [RBASE-L] - VarChar Data and RTF
Marc,
Now that I've refreshed my memory a bit on RTF, it seems like there is
likely an all RBase way of concatenating RTF with at least a couple of
major hurdles. Now it is true this could be an all RBase solution, but as
you will read below, it could become cumbersome to the point that it
should be done in a DLL for speeds sake.
One biggie would be that the originating RTF isn't from a recent version
of Word. I looked at the difference in the RTF from WordPad and the same
document saved in Word and word has over a hundred lines of crap after the
"legal RTF" document description that relates to the Theme (meta) data
from Word.
The second, is you have to be prepared to programatically manipulate the
Font Table. The font table "{\fonttbl" is created with the documents
default font as "\f0" and with the first change after that "\f1" and so on
in that fashion, so if the merged document has the same fonts, but were
created in a different order, the lookup for the font to apply for the
text in the font table will display an incorrect font, so merged RTF has
to have any disparate (non existing) font added to the base document's
Font Table, and the sequencing of the font markup changed to match the
order of the Font Table
Now for the structure of the RTF.
It appears that when there is a complete "file" or document description,
the document header line ends in a CRLF, so to determine if the VarChar
data is just a snippet or a complete document, you need to test for the
presence of expected text in the header, the most obvious is the first 5
characters of the file "{\rtf", with the 6th character being the version
of the RTF (1 through 4).
So if you test for the headers presence and it is TRUE, then to add
another snippet to it, we need to remove the LAST character of the file,
which is the last closing brace "}" , then you can concantenate your
snippet to it, ADD back the closing brace "}" and you have a complete
file.
If you are merging TWO Files together, you would remove the header from
the second file (after removing the closing brace from the first) and
simply concantenate the remainder of the second file to the first
(observing what has to happen to the font table as described before).
HTH,
Mike
