InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by brnorman on 2008/12/30 10:53

Is there a way to copy multiple lines of text and paste them so that each line becomes separate item?

Although I don't need this right now I seem to recall that ECCO could split one item into many and join multiple items into single item. Is this doable now or planned?

Thanks,

Bruce

Comments

Shift-CTRL-S will split an item into 2 (at the current cursor point), which is the same as in Ecco
Shift-CTRL-J will join items:
- It prompts you for a delimiter to add when joining the item's text. If left empty, will add line feeds.
- It joins the item text, but does not delete the merged items, so to not lose valuable field-values, if present. If desired, simply delete them.

Thanks Pierre.

What about the first question? Can I paste multiple lines of text into multiple items automatically?

this is interesting - dont think this in manual so I'll do my trick of trying to understand

can you (or someone) explain

what a delimiter is - is it like you would have in a csv file - the tab key or ";" ?
what is a line feed?

Minor interface thing - Re joining items, the dialogue box says

Merge Items

Split items using...

hmm,

I tried joining two items a couple of times

I got different results but mostly the following (in fact after the first couple of attempts I always get this-)

instead of the two original items remaining, one seems to usually merge with a copy of the other - so one original item is lost

Tom -

Yes a delimiter is usually a special character and that is exactly what is used in csv (which stands for comma separated values) and the comma is the delimiter in this case.

A line feed is a character that takes you to the next line. If you remember the typewriter in the days before electric when you came to the end of the line you would manually hit a bar and send the carriage back to the left side of the paper. This was a carriage return plus a line feed. The carriage return back to the left and the line feed to move the paper up. You have same concept in computers with separate characters for carriage return and line feed.

I tried the split join briefely and it seemed to not work exactly right but I was much more interested in the first question so I haven't pursued it at the moment.

I think this needs to be added to this page

http://www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php?q=node/147

Done. Thanks for suggesting

thanks Bruce

ooups, I had meant to answers this too

[quote=brnorman]

Is there a way to copy multiple lines of text and paste them so that each line becomes separate item?

[/quote]

if you paste "milti-line" text -

a dialogue box will (should) show with the options to

1) Paste all text into selected cells

2) Paste each line into a seperate item creating new items if necessary

hope that helps

edit - that would of course be multi-line where a carriage return has been used between lines

edit2 - Pierre I think this is another thing that can be problematic with full-line selection (pastes into cell without asking)

Bruce, in case you have that problem see [How do I] Simply Copy Text from a Field ?

The setting is In the menus :

Grid-->"select mode" --> multi-columns - this is currently better than full-line selection

Thanks Tom -

For some reason I did not get the dialog box when I first tried this. I tried it again and now it worked and I'm happy :)

edit2 - Pierre I think this is another thing that can be problematic with full-line selection (pastes into cell without asking)

**This is what happened to me