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The backstory is that I had to move a 1.5 MB Excel file from a 20 year old OS9 machine to my Mac Mini. Straight excel format did not work, nor did CSV. Headers only were returned for each. I am not sure why.

Copied as straight text, however, came over as a terminal file, but the full dataset was readable. I discovered early on that there was only 18 lines in it, and those were likely derived from peculiar large blank portions of the raw data. The original text had nearly 600 regular excel lines.

I thought it would be easy until i realized that all the tabs and returns were deleted. Hence the hunt for certain words that I could use to parse that data back into a usable form.

Thank heaven for the modern itemDelimiter.

Craig

CSV is text. How did it not work?

I'm guessing there are some hidden line endings in the file which LC treats as plain text. If you look at the file in a text editor that shows hidden characters you might see them. Replace with line feeds and you might get normal lines in LC. BBEdit could do it.

I have always had issues bringing really old Excel files into a modern machine and simply opening them there. When I tried CSV, the terminal in my Mac Mini held only a few obscure "header" type lines of text, and none of the "body". Plain text brought over just the body, but was missing tabs and returns.

Thanks for the talk, but I am done with it. My parsing gadgetry restored the original lines intact. This is not an Excel forum.

Craig

I respect that you're done, so this is for others who may come across this in the future:

Terminal may interpret some text as directives.

If you want to read raw text from a text file try opening it in a text editor.

Hi oblix. What are you building with LiveCode?

@oblix.

Recall that the issue is not about large amounts of data per se, but about REALLY long single lines displayed in a field. It is that particular aspect of a field's contents that causes the issue.

Craig

Out of curiosity is this sensitive data or are u able to share the source spreadsheet?

I have many times had to parse outputs from medical devices supposedly in excel format but not really, or other strange formats and am curious….

S.

Stam.

...share the source spreadsheet?

It no longer exists in LC, since after the stack I made to carve it up was successful, I tossed it.

But I have the old Mac v.9 spreadsheet and can copy to a text file. Watch this space...

Craig

dunbarx wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2023 6:02 pm Stam.

...share the source spreadsheet?

It no longer exists in LC, since after the stack I made to carve it up was successful, I tossed it.

But I have the old Mac v.9 spreadsheet and can copy to a text file. Watch this space...

Craig

I think the old excel file might be more interesting... the process of converting to text may in itself indroduce issues...

Stam.

Hmmm. I will see if I can just attach the file itself.

Craig