Just thought I would throw this question out there in the off chance that someone may have done this. I have exported a Sesame database to a comma seperated .txt file. There are ~6000 unique records and the .txt file contains ~52000 records in total, with each record having about 8 copies in the .txt file. They aren't exact copies however, some fields are different and I need to merge all 8 copies into one copy with the different fields being seperated by a special char. such as a semi-colon.  Any suggestions? I have written some code but I get all the duplicate records in the out put double element array, I think I need a function that will allow me to delete an array index but can't find any such function in the Sesame programming documentation. In the code below, a[m,4]  contains a unique value for the ~6000 records.
Thanks

while m < numOfRec {
     l = l+1
     if a[m,4] = a[l,4] Then {
                 For n = 1 to 46
                 if a[m,n] <> a[l,n]{
                           b[m,n] = a[m,n] +";"+ a[l,n]
                       
                 }
             next                  
           
     }
     
     if l = numOfRec {
           m = m+1
           l = m
     }
}

From your description, it sounds like you have a hierarchial ascii export from Sesame or Access or whatever, where each child record repeats the parent information to keep track of which child goes with each parent, correct?


Yes, I have exported an ascii file from Sesame's export spec and each record has at least 8 rows in the file, with usually only one or two rows having different data in its fields.

If so, it may be easiest to approach this from the other direction. Instead of trying to read in the file which is necessarily complex, could you instead, export from the application using the built in programming language, so that a parent and all of its children are all on the same line in the export file?

Unfortunatley I can't export using the built in programming language, scope seems to be the problem, I struggled with that issue for a while. The only function that I could find that would allow me to traverse through the records one at a time using an index was @FormFieldValue() but its scope is limited to the open form and I have several subforms in my application that contains the data I need. If you know of another way please let me know. Thanks for your help.