The more I learn about this the less I want to do it.
I think I will put it on the back burner for a long time.
Thanks all
Marc
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Lawrence Lustig" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:54 AM
To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]>
Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: VarChar Data and RTF
<<
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.
Unfortunately, they will not work reliably on RTF encoded text. The
reason is that the text that you may THINK is written as "[FNAME]"
(because that's what it looks like) is not represented that way in the
encode text:
1. It could have RTF encoding in the middle of it.
2. It could have escaped characters that don't look like what you think
they look like. For instance, I'm not sure if the square brackets are
escaped in RTF text, but plenty of characters are.
In otherwords, the RTF encoded text for "[FNAME]" could read "\[FN{rtf
blah blah}AME\]". It's impossible to predict what will appear in the text
in advance because it can depend on editing decisions made by the user in
the RTF control (applying and removing styles, for instance).
If the RTF text you want to operate on is fixed (entered by you, once, and
stored in a table without change) and if you take the time to examine the
resulting text and specifically code your SRPLs to whatever you find in
the text, you could make this work. But if you later change that text
using an RTF control or allow the user to edit it, you'd have to recode
your SRPLs.
To check how hacked up your text is, simply BROWSE the VARCHAR column that
contains the RTF encoded text. You will be shocked at what's going on in
there.
The only reliable way I know of performing these kinds of RTF replacements
is to instantiate an RTF control and use the API of that control to search
and replace. This is not directly supported by R:Base (at least, not at
this time) although I imagine it can be done using Windows messaging.
The takeaway? Programmatic operation on RTF text is not something for the
faint of heart. Any solution relying on operating on the encoded text is
likely to be a hack that will come apart at the first opportunity for
failure. If you need to do it, you'll want to find a way to use the API.
--
Larry
