Tabbed delimited data

[Mitch Christensen]

I am working with CSV data and making great progress.  Unfortunately, our files are tab-delimited, and we have no control over this.

So far, I've had no luck configuring the FlatToXml processor to use TAB characters as field/column separators.  I've tried various <field-separator/> values including TAB (whitespace), '\t', etc.

I suppose that I could preprocess the file somehow to replace the tabs with some other character, but is seems as though TAB delimited text is common enough that it should be supported.

TIA,
-Mitch

[Mitch Christensen]

This turned out to be a tough one.  I ended up having to hack the code a bit to get it to work.

I made the following change to com.babeldoc.conversion.flatfile.digester.InputDoucment.java:

    /**
     * Set the field separator charactor (CSV)
     *
     * @param fieldSeparator
     *            DOCUMENT ME!
     */
    public void setFieldSeparator(String fieldSeparator) {
        //    System.out.println("[InputDocument.setFieldSeparator]:
        // "+fieldSeparator);
        if (fieldSeparator.equals("\\t")) {
            this.fieldSeparator = "\t";
        } else {
            this.fieldSeparator = fieldSeparator;
        }
    }

This change allows me to do the following:

<field-separator>\t</field-separator>

in order to process tab-delimited files.

If you are interested in a full description of the problem/symptom, see bug #865405

-Mitch

[bruce mcdonald]

Thanks for the leg work - I have made the fix to the CVS.