[mv] text file hard tab processing utility available

["Steve Fairhead" <steve@sfdesign.co.uk>]

******    message to minivend-users from "Steve Fairhead" <steve@sfdesign.co.uk>     ******

Hi folks,

It's just dawned on me that a little textfile-processing utility I wrote
some time ago, and available from my website, might be of use to those who
construct Minivend databases under DOS/Windows.

>From http://www.sfdesign.co.uk/software.htm: "LINEPROC: you've generated a
report, nicely formatted in columns, and you want to import it into a
spreadsheet. However the spreadsheet program needs the columns to be
delimited by hard tabs; while you could do this by hand, it's a nuisance.
Or, you're importing a manually formatted document into a modern word
processor which, again, understands columns only if you're using hard tabs.
Or, you have a text file full of hard tabs and want to turn them,
intelligently, into spaces. LINEPROC processes text files to generate, or
remove, hard tabs; tab stop positions can be specified as required, either
at regular intervals or individually."

Thus LINEPROC can be used to turn a plain text file, arranged in fixed
columns using spaces, into a hard-tab delimited database, with user-defined
tab stops, and all extraneous whitespace stripped out.

Note:

1) There is no documentation. Run LINEPROC with no command line arguments
for help, such as it is. (Yell if you need some - you might.)

2) It currently uses the DOS convention of CR-LF line termination. (I could
very easily add an option to use Unix-style LF-only termination if
required.)

3) It would be easy to port this to Unix. I'd happily provide all source
code (ANSI C); it's not rocket science. (Although I wouldn't be too
surprised to learn there are standard Unix tools to do this sort of
line-parsing thang.)

Sorry if this is noise to some; it'd be nice if it spared someone some
error-prone manual reformatting...

Steve

------------------------------------------
Steve Fairhead - SFD - Solutions by Design
   www: http://www.sfdesign.co.uk
------------------------------------------

-
To unsubscribe from the list, DO NOT REPLY to this message.  Instead, send
email with 'UNSUBSCRIBE minivend-users' in the body to Majordomo@minivend.com.
Archive of past messages: http://www.minivend.com/minivend/minivend-list