ASCII File Conversion Unix/NT

ASCII File Conversion Unix/NT

It seems that Unix and NT use different hidden control characters to terminate lines in text files.

Symptoms:

	When running a Program File, this causes I-DEAS to error out with incompatible control characters. You will get the message "System read error on line 1 of command input file".
	When importing a Universal File, I-DEAS will act like it's reading all the lines, but report that "x" lines have been read and "0" processed.

There are some workarounds that will convert the control characters and get the file so that it will read on your system.

Running on Windows NT

If you're running on Windows NT and using a file that exhibits the error message above, then it is very likely that the program file originated on a Unix system. Although a bit convoluted (and there may be better/easier ways to do this, but I haven't found them yet), you can use the following approach to workaround the problem.

open the program file in a text editor, e.g. Notepad

Select All, Copy

Exit the text editor

Launch Microsoft Word and open a new, empty document

Paste -- you should now have all the desired program file text in Word

Select All

set the Font to Courier New and the Fontsize to very small (say 8 pt)

move the righthand Ruler as far to the right as possible -- the purpose here is to make sure that no lines wraparound

visually check to make sure that no lines have wraparound and that no blank lines exist

Save-As, Save as type = Text only with line breaks... "your-desired-name.prg"

Or, Ken Mcintyre of Dart Container offers the following approach:

rename your program file to "program.old"

in ideas, create a new program (e.g. "program.prg") and do anything in it.

In Wordpad

open "program.prg" with Wordpad and delete EVERYTHING.

open "program.old" with Wordpad, select everything(cntrl-A) and copy it (cntrl-C)

switch to "program.prg" and paste the file in (cntrl-V)

save program.prg as type "Text"

Ken also makes the following further observations:

Reading Text Files into I-DEAS (from I-DEAS "readme" file)
"The I-DEAS software requires a carriage-return (<CR>) at the end of ASCII text (*.txt) files, so be sure to press <Return> at the end of the last line in the file if you use Notepad or other editors to edit an I-DEAS text file (and ALWAYS "Save As" a text file)."

What I found was that:

this program file will give you the "system read error on line 1" error message:

---------------------------------------
K : #OUTPUT "I'm Here"
E :
---------------------------------------

but this will not:

---------------------------------------
K : #OUTPUT "I'm Here"
E :

---------------------------------------
(Notice the extra blank line at the very end)

Running on Unix

In this event, it is likely that the program file or universal file was created on Windows and includes hidden "control-M" characters at the end of each line. You can use a script (typed from the Unix command line) to remove these control characters:

For Program Files:

perl -pi.bak -0777 -e 's#\r##gi' filename.prg
(where "filename" is the name of your file)

For Universal Files:

perl -pi.bak -0777 -e 's#\r##gi' filename.unv
(where "filename" is the name of your file)