The easiest way to learn how to use Add/Strip (A/S) is to experiment. There are often several settings combinations which will create the same, or nearly the same, document. You’ll need to find settings that work best with your documents.
To illustrate only a few of the types of things A/S can do, I have included a few demos. Each folder contains a settings file and one or more TEXT files to be processed using the settings contained in the settings file.
Database Demos ƒ
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Manipulating TEXT files that came from or are destined for a database application is a popular way to use A/S. A/S can convert to and from the tab delimited format in several ways. Dealing with columnar text, text that is padded with spaces to create a columnar appearance when a monospaced font like Monaco is used, can be a bit trickier.
In the single example I include here, I have the output of a database application. It is arranged so that each line contains a 5-digit user code, a space, and then the user name.
I want to convert the file so that a comma separates the user code and user name, and quotes surround both elements. I also want to append a date (with quotes around it) to each line.
I chose to use line replacements replace the sixth character of each line with a quote-comma-quote sequence. I use any char (“^?”) wildcards for matching and replacing since I want to specify the sixth character for replacement.
I chose to use line replacements append the date sequence. The best way to insert characters at the end of lines is to use Line Replacement strings.
Since I still needed to insert a quote at the start of each line, I changed the Leading Chars string to a single quote and set the Leading Chars operation to Insert. The best way to insert characters at the start of lines is to use Line Replacement strings. Another way to insert characters at the start of lines is to use the Leading Chars string but fewer characters are allowed in this string than in a Line Replacement string.
HTML Convert ƒ
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There are two demos that show how A/S can manipulate HyperText Markup Language (HTML) formatted files. HTML describes a series of formatting codes that are added to a text document to specify formatting options like font size and font style. The coding can be quite complex. Internet World Wide Web pages are formatted using HTML.
The first demo takes advantage of the fact that HTML surrounds formatting codes with less than (“<”) and greater than (“>”) characters. Thanks to the any chars wildcard (“^@”), I can use a search string of “<^@>” to match any characters between the less than and greater than characters and then remove them. I do this searching using Replacements because these formatting codes can span lines.
I also replace HTML character codes with the corresponding Macintosh characters. Additionally, I limit the number of lines and strip leading white space and normalize spacing. I simply Read & Write as the main process, but this may be able to be changed to one of the Make Paragraphs for some HTML documents.
The second demo attempts to preserve some of the HTML formatting information by converting the HTML text file to a Rich Text Format (RTF) file. In many ways the RTF format is similar to HTML documents, but there are some tricks that need to be used to get A/S to create RTF files in the way I want.
RTF files contain a header that describes the fonts, style sheets, colors, and various other settings. The header I want to use is longer than 255 characters so I cannot add it directly by using the BOF insert string. Instead, what I do is to use the BOF string to insert a series of my own codes into the text as it is read from the input file and replace each code with a corresponding replacement string, effectively expanding the text inserted by the BOF string until it is the full header.
Since the HTML -> RTF Codes settings makes extensive use of the any chars wildcard, it is advisable to increase A/S’s preferred memory size so that the input file will be read in larger chunks and will be less likely to miss matches when they may span chunks.
This demo handles many HTML codes and does a reasonable job of converting them to RTF. However, it should be noted that A/S is simply searching and replacing text. There is no interpretation of the codes; no stacking and unstacking of formatting states. If the HTML file contains mistakes, certain required formatting commands are missing, or codes are used that are not included in specific replacement sets, the conversion may not work as expected.
I’ve actually included two setting file that attempt to convert HTML documents to RTF documents. They are identical except that one converts <BR> codes to carriage returns and the other converts <BR> codes to end of line marks which are genearted in Word by pressing shift-return.
Forms and tables are not currently handled by this demo.
Make Paragraphs ƒ
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Here is a very basic operation; selectively removing carriage returns (CRs) to make paragraphs. In other words, CRs are only used at the end of a paragraph, not each line, allowing the text to wrap at the paragraph margins.
The only tricky part in this is determining which CRs should be removed. A/S tries to use blank lines and indentation to determine where paragraphs are supposed to be located (Make Paragraphs process). When indentation is not a reliable way of determining the start of a new paragraph, A/S can be told to ignore indentation and use only blank lines (Make Paragraphs2 process).
Of course, if there is more indentation where paragraphs start, it may be possible to remove all but these extra spaces and then process letting A/S use the remaining indentation to determine paragraphs. The Process Shareware2.txt settings file illustrates this technique on the Shareware2.txt file.
There are three settings files in this folder. One of them, Process Register.txt/PCNET.TXT, is meant to process both Register.txt and PCNET.TXT files. PCNET.TXT contains line feeds, but A/S automatically removes them when making paragraphs.
Sequential Replacements ƒ
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Here I use three replacement sets to convert a Word 5 document which contains the raw output of Word’s indexing function.
I wanted to have a single tab between the index item text and the item’s page numbers instead of the space that Word used. Using a three replacement sets and wildcards I replace the target space with a tab.
This illustrates a method of temporarily marking a character sequence to prevent it from being changed, performing replacements, and then restoring the tagged sequence.
