The VarChar doesn't know crap from shinola as far as what it contains. It
contains VARying length of CHARacters and that's all. So SRPL and other
text manipulation functions work just fine.
----- Original Message -----
From: "MDRD" <[email protected]>
To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 12:30 PM
Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: VarChar Data and RTF
I have been doing this for years with plain text and it works Great. Then I
decided it would be cool to add bold and red text to the notes and I bit off
more than I can chew.
My goal is to get some formatted text from a Varchar column that is stored
in a lookup table such as this
[Fname] was instructed to put Ice on his ankle ....
Warning do not freeze your foot
Do a SRPL to change [Fname] to .vFname ...and a few more SRPL's
then add that to the end of the patient notes which are stored in a Varchar
column.
The patient notes in the Varchar field may already have Bold or red text too
I believe you can SRPL plain text for plain text in a Varchar column even if
it has bold and red text?
At least the limited testing I did seemed to work.
Thanks
Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "MikeB" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 9:54 AM
To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: VarChar Data and RTF
You have never specified the original "source" of the RTF. That's why I
listed how to join them, no matter the source. If the text that is stored
contains formatting, _including_ BOLD or FONT, then my description
applies.
If it only contains CRLF, then it is plain text. If the data isn't
sensitive, why don't you show two sources you are trying to combine so we
can go from there?
----- Original Message -----
From: "MDRD" <[email protected]>
To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 9:01 AM
Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: VarChar Data and RTF
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
--------------------------------------------------
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
