Microsoft KB Archive/143245

= How to Strip Quotation Marks from an ASCII Delimited Text File =

Article ID: 143245

Article Last Modified on 12/3/2003

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft FoxPro 2.6a Professional Edition for Macintosh
 * Microsoft FoxPro 2.6a Standard Edition
 * Microsoft FoxPro 2.6a Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Visual FoxPro 3.0 Standard Edition
 * Microsoft Visual FoxPro 3.0b Standard Edition

-



This article was previously published under Q143245



SUMMARY
Typical methods of generating ASCII text files place double quotation marks around character fields. Sometimes these quotation marks aren't wanted. This article presents a way to remove the quotation marks programmatically. If there are double quotation marks embedded in the data itself, however, this method cannot be used.



MORE INFORMATION
To remove quotation marks from an ASCII text file programmatically, you must first place the file in a memo field. Then the STRTRAN function can be used to replace each instance of double quotations with a blank space. The corrected contents of the memo field can then be copied to an ASCII text file.

To demonstrate this technique, type and run the following program named Myprog.prg. * myprog.prg SET SAFETY OFF

* Create a table named "mymemo" with one memo field named "notes" * Append a blank record to the table CREATE TABLE mymemo ( notes M(10)) APPEND BLANK

IF !USED("mymemo") USE mymemo IN 0 ENDIF

IF !USED("customer") USE customer IN 0 ENDIF

* copy the company and CONTACT fields to an ASCII tab-delimited text * file SELECT CUSTOMER COPY TO mytext.txt FIELDS company, contact TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB

* Place the ASCII file, Mytext.txt, into the memo field notes in the * mymemo table SELECT mymemo APPEND MEMO mymemo.notes FROM mytext.txt OVERWRITE

* Replace each instance of double quotes with a blank REPLACE notes WITH STRTRAN(notes,'"',"")

* Copy the corrected quoteless text back into another ASCII text file COPY MEMO notes TO quoteles.txt

* Close tables USE SELECT customer USE * end program Using any text editor, open Mytext.txt and observe the double quotation marks around the character fields. Then open Quoteles.txt to confirm that the quotation marks have been removed.

Additional query words: FoxWin FoxDos FoxMac VFoxWin quotes

Keywords: kbcode KB143245

-

[mailto:TECHNET@MICROSOFT.COM Send feedback to Microsoft]

© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.