#9 Comma- or Tab-Delimited Output from Windows Command Shell (CMD) ?

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to create anything other than space-delimited output from the Windows version of fft.exe using the standard Windows command shell (cmd.exe)? I was hoping to produce tab-delimited output that I could paste into directly into Microsoft Excel.

I have tried every argument for the -d option that I can think of, including escaped "T" and "t" (for TAB) using caret, back-slash, and accent characters as escape flags. I also tried running cmd.exe with the /F:OFF option, which lets the TAB key write an actual tab character to the command line, and I have tried that with and without quotes and/or escape flags.

In every case, the program either fails, writing "Error: in option 'delimiter': invalid option value" to the log file, or else it runs and writes space-delimited output, ignoring the -d argument. I have also tried using a comma and other printable ASCII characters including letters and numbers as the -d argument, with and without single or double quotes around them, and the result is always the same.

PS: I almost forgot to say thank you so much for writing this program! It has made life so much easier I can't even tell you. It's really a terrible hardship to open the output file in a text editor and replace spaces with tabs, or pipe standard out to CLIP and paste into Excel, then run the Text-to-Columns function. It would just be nice if I could find a way to skip those additional steps.

[jon]

Dear Anonymous,

Thanks for your feed-back! This little project is now so old and I had completely forgotten about it. I appreciate very much that someone is actually using it.

I reproduced the behavior you described and the software is definitely misbehaving. I also realize that there is no way of distinguishing between the delimiters in the input and the ones in the output.

Now over the holidays, I have some time and maybe I can look at this, but I cannot promise anything.
Thanks again and happy holidays!

[jon]

The delimiter issue should now be fixed. Please check the new versions. Note that currently only 64 bit versions are available as pre-built binariesl.