Hello forum, I have a problem with special characters when copied from a mail in notes. The situation is a bit complicated and looks like this: our client uses Notes as well as an application we developed in FileMaker Pro 11. Our application exchanges data with a MySQL database using PHP commands.
Now this exchange doesn’t work when the user copies text from the Notes mail client into a FileMaker textfield, the MySQL database rejects the data. The same data can be transferred without problems if the users first paste the text in a simple text editor like notepad, then copies it again from there before pasting it into the FileMaker fields.
So we concluded that there must be some hidden characters that get filtered by the text editor.
Is there a way to avoid theses characters being copied in the first place?
Thanks for any input. When answering please keep in mind that we are complete noobs when it comes to Notes, nobody here ever worked with the system so far.
Subject: Rich text vs text
We have a similar problem when people copy email content from Outlook and paste it into a text field in Notes. It appears to be valid but if we then attempt to use OLE to export the pasted text from Notes into Excel, the export dies when it hits one of these invisible ‘not text’ characters.
I’m not familiar with FileMaker but here are some concepts you might try.
Can you do a ‘paste special - text’ into FM?
Does FM have any kind of field content conversions you could run on the pasted content. In Notes, we’d do something like an Abstract to get just the text components.
Is there an option to programmatically push the Notes content into FM? If so, you should be able to control the content.
If you get something working, please post back.
Doug
Subject: Avoid hidden chars when copying from Notes?
Do a search for “Windows clipboard spy” or “Windows clipboard viewer”. Pick one of the various solutions, download it, and run it. (Sorry, I can’t recommend anything more specific. It’s been a long time since I used any tools like this.) When you have it running, try the copy operation in the Notes client the way your users do, and inspect the clipboard contents. You will probably find that Notes has put the data on the clipboard in multiple formats. The issue is either that Notes is not putting any format with cleaned up plain text on the clipboard, or that FileMaker is choosing to take the data format that is not cleaned up. Testing this way will at least tell you what’s going on, and might help you find a solution.