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LionelR1
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
Question

Parsing a tab delimited file

  • April 22, 2008
  • 4 replies
  • 2001 views
I have a tab delimited text file that I'm trying to parse. My question is how do you find the end of the row if its tab delimited??? Thanks
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4 replies

L
LionelR1Author
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
Unfortunatly our ISP does not support dbf. databases, that's why I'm trying to parse into a query. So there's no way to parse this file correct? Thanks again.
J
JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2
Inspiring
April 22, 2008
You might try using the Access driver to connect to the file.
L
LionelR1Author
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
Sorry, try http://www.wireworks.net/cashout.zip
J
JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2
Inspiring
April 22, 2008
quote:
Originally posted by: LionelR
Sorry, try http://www.wireworks.net/cashout.zip


The content of the zip file is not a text file. If you are trying to query a *.dbf file you might see if this file format supports JDBC or ODBC and use regular cfquery tags.
L
LionelR1Author
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
Bob, Can you take a look at the actual file, (I've included a link to it in my previous message) and tell me if its even possible to parse this file. Thanks
J
JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2
Inspiring
April 22, 2008
quote:
Originally posted by: LionelR
Bob, Can you take a look at the actual file, (I've included a link to it in my previous message) and tell me if its even possible to parse this file. Thanks


Browsing URL http://www.wireworks.net/cashout.dbf returns HTTP Error 404.3 - File or directory not found: MIME map policy prevents this request.

You might try posting a zipped copy of the file or a copy with a different file extension. Also please verify cashout.dbf is a text file and not a database file.
J
JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2
Inspiring
April 22, 2008
Treat the the tab delimted text as list with the newline character as the delimiter. See the CHR function.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=functions_c-d_04.html#4749523
L
LionelR1Author
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
Bob,

Can you be more specific? How is the newline character used as a delimiter?

Also another issue I forgot to mention is what do you do when the field is empty in a tab delimited file!?? If a field is emply it messes up my parsing sequence and the fields are mismatched...
L
LionelR1Author
Known Participant
April 22, 2008
See attached sample
Thank you for the detailed answer and code however the code you provided is not working on the tab delimited file I have. I used your example line for line. First your specified loop delimiter "Chr(13)" does NOT parse the tabs, however when I replaced delimiters="#Chr(13)#" with delimiters "(six spaces)" in the cfloop, it worked. I don't know why.

Second, I get an error "The element at position 2 cannot be found." #variables.lineSet[2]# which tells us we're not identifying the end of line either. I've included a chunk of the actual file I'm trying to parse for your reference. The actual 7mb file can be downloaded here Tab delimited file

Again, thank you.

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