Thanks to all that replied to my posting. I read a few replies suggesting that I use XML and not fixed length. As I stated in my original note, fixed length was a requirement. I guess I should have supplied more information.
Part of my company was recently sold. The buying company has asked that I send them data associated with the business that they bought. Their requirement is that the data sent to them be importable into an Excel Spreadsheet. Personally I don't think it will ever be part of a spreadsheet. I think the approach they are taking is that if it can go into a spread sheet, they can import it into almost anything. As for the data, my source file is variable length. I plan on parsing through it, capturing the longest field lengths and letting the captured length determine what the fixed length of the data items will be. One row in my output file will be the equivalent of a record in my source file. The row will contain all of the source fields from one record, formatted into a fixed length (left justified, space filled), concatenated together. As long as I tell the recipients of the data , what the data lengths are, they should not have a problem putting the data into column format. I had though that the PC would choke on the UV delimiters but thanks to a couple of posts, I tested it out and Excel can handle VMs SVMs and TMs, so other than stripping out garbage characters, I think I am all set. Will - your posting mentioned CONVERT(VM,"|", mydata) - my version of UV does not seem to like that. Thanks to everyone that took the time to read my note. To all the people that e-mailed me privately, offering to sell me products to do this - thanks but I will only be doing this once. Jim >-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 8:34 AM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: UV to Text Conversion Standard? > > >I am hopeful someone can offer me some guidance. > >I have to move data off of my Universe system and send it to a PC for >inclusion in a Excel Spreadsheet. > >Some background: >Source data is alpha/ numeric and contains VM's, SVMs and TM >Source data fields are variable lengths > >Requirements: >Output must be fixed length >Output must be importable into Excel (column definitions will >be based on a >fixed length map) > >My problem: >I think Excel will choke on VMs, SVMs and TM characters. Is there a >standard , ASCII character that I should use to represent them? To further complicate things, sone of the fields represent data that was input with >little (or no restrictions), ie. any character on the keyboard was considered valid. > >Thanks > >Jim > > >-- >u2-users mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
