However, the syntax needed to be a little different, it seems, at least on my OS X 10.5.8 machine. To go from pipes to commas, the command looks like this:

tr “|” “,” thecleanfile.txt

As a Unix newbie, I didn’t know that I needed double-quotes around the strings. And I didn’t know that the “” are needed to specify the input and output files respectively. I thought they were the typical sort of bracketing used by folks elsewhere to indicate “install your own text here” so I omitted them. Oops.

Just thought I’d mention that, since this page seems to be directed to folks who, like me, are not Terminal experts.

Text parsing is quite challenging in filemaker. I can’t go into detail about exactly how you would do it because it can be quite different depending on the data that you want to parse. I might be able to at least point you in the right direction. Here are a couple questions for you:

What type of delimiter does the file use?

Are the lines you would like to dispose of uniform?

I have a similar problem a little more complicated. I am importing whole folders of text files. Those text files have lines that I want converted to records. I want to accomplish more or less the same thing, and that is, to import the content of the text file in a TEMP field and later parse it.

The only problem is that the content of that TEMP field has to be converted to N number of records and then the data (a couple of fields only) parsed to fields.

How do I start to parse the lines that are going to be records (some lines are junk) and then parse the fields?

Geoff