Crystal Software Home Page

 End-of-line (EOL) Converter

Visit the Crystal Software Website
Technical Support Website

 


This wizard converts end of line characters from one Operating System (PC/Mac/Unix) format to another. Notes are further below.

1. End-of-line Conversion to Perform

My input files are: I don't know. Please detect this automatically
MS-DOS/PC/Windows format
Unix or Amiga format
Macintosh format
A mainframe report format with a fixed record length of characters
A mainframe CMS V-format or F-format

I want my output files to be: MS-DOS/PC/Windows format
Unix or Amiga format
Macintosh format
Use the following string instead:
None. Remove all line feeds

Do you want the original files to be overwritten? Yes, overwrite the original files with the converted files
No, give the new files the following extension:


(You may be prompted to allow IE to interact with TextPipe - just click Yes)

2. Files and Folders to Process

Drag and drop the files and folders you want processed from Windows Explorer to anywhere in TextPipe's window. Folders automatically get '*.*' added to them to process all files.

You can tailor the file list in a number of ways. To find out how, click the cursor in TextPipe's file grid to select it, then press F1.

3. Begin Processing

 
  Display TextPipe while processing occurs

 


Technical Notes

End of line characters

In plain text files (see Plain text files?), special characters are used to mark where the end of each line is. The special characters used differ from one Operating System to the next:

  • PC/MS-DOS/Windows uses the character 13 followed by character 10
  • Unix and Amiga uses character 10 on its own
  • Macintosh uses character 13 on its own
  • Mainframe systems like the IBM AS/400 don't even use an end of line character, but rely instead on knowing how many characters are in each line or record, and then they assume a line break after that many characters have been read. You need to know how many character per line/record in order to successfully convert one of these files (normally this is 132 characters per record).

Note that simply converting end of line characters will NOT successfully convert a file from, say, Macintosh to Windows format unless the file is a plain text file.

Plain text files?

A plain text file is one that does not include any formatting, fonts, colors or images. It consists purely of one ASCII character after another. Word documents are NOT plain text files, because Word saves all kinds of special information with the file. A plain text file can be opened and edited in Notepad.

 

 

This page won't work if you came directly to it from a search engine. Please access it via the main page.

 

 Contact Us   |  Support   |  Crystal Software Newsletter
 © 1999-2004 Crystal Software. All rights reserved.