data merge text wrangler

[JonathanArias]

Hi,

i have a data merge i am doing, i saved my  excel file as a .csv, but none of the commas show.  I am using textwrangler and i was wondering if anybody knew how to do a grep search to add a "," after each line break? i added a screenshot below so you can see what i see. i have lots of lists and i am looking for a fast way to add the commas from text wrangler.

Thanks

[winterm]

What if copy/paste everything in a fresh indd doc, do a grep here, and paste the resulting text back?

[JonathanArias]

hmm. i was hoping to knock it all out from text wrangler at one shot.

i am doing this first:

regex - How to replace line-breaks with commas using grep in TextWrangler? - Stack Overflow

that removes teh breaks, so i do next:

Google Groups

and than i get to where i want to be. and move on to the next list. was just curious as to been able to do it all in one shot so i can work my way down all of the .csv files first, get them prep, and move on to indesign and data merge next.

[Colin Flashman · Accepted solution]

This GREP code will add a comma to the end of every line without having to do a two-step procedure:

However, I agree with Jongware, why would you want to do this? If the database has one field, it doesn't need commas, the end of line tells ID's Data Merge that the record has ended and to begin another one.

[JonathanArias]

i did not know that. i have always done commas. good to know. thank you.

[Jeffrey_Smith]

The text file saved from Text Wrangler can be used in a data merge.

[Jongware]

I don't get it. If you replace every line break with a comma, then you have everything on a single long line. How is that better?

[JonathanArias]

i watched video how the guy had a data merge and he has a .csv file with commas at the end of the entry. that was last year and ever since i had done it that way.

[Colin Flashman]

if there is more than one field in a database, then there needs to be a separator between the fields. For the data that InDesign can import, CSV will use a comma while TXT will use a tab. The latter is my preference as it allows me to keep commas within a record without a sea of quotation marks to indicate where a field should/should not start.

The header row also dictates how many fields will appear. Take the following example:

title

john,joseph,

joanne,mary,leanne,sarah,

cat,bird,

dad,budgie,

champ,is,a,dog

colin,,

If I save this as a csv or txt file and select it as a data source to InDesign, note how only the first field is imported, despite data being present in other fields:

[JonathanArias]

ahhhhhhhhhh... i did not know you could get away with that. i been formatting this more than needed. Thank you