Re: Thunderbird

--- Joel Rees <joel_rees@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> the two newlines are most likely (as someone
> suggested) two separate 
> characters, a separate problem. If our guess is
> right, it's the old 
> CR-LF pair (probably each with their own zero high
> byte).

That may be true, but when I converted the file from
UTF-16 to UTF-8 the extra newlines disappeared too.
(Yeah, before the last post I converted to UTF-8 and
tried it again.)

> > Turns out that that was in fact (one of) the
> > problem(s). Also turns out that Firebird does not
> in
> > fact support vCard format. (The import function is
> > reading each line in as a separate entry ala
.csv.)
> 
> You might be jumping to conclusions there -- if
> Thunderbird sees either 
> CR or LF as end of line, it may be thinking the card
> is being 
> terminated after every line (an apparently empty
> line being seen as the 
> terminator). This would be especially true when
> expecting UTF-8 but 
> getting UTF-16, because of those high bytes that
> would look like NULs.

As UTF-16 Thunderbird doesn't find anything in the
file, once it's been changed into UTF-8 it does see it
but interprets each line as a record--so it takes
BEGIN:VCARD as one record, splits it at commas or tabs
via some heuristic (leaving BEGIN:VCARD as the only
field returned) and puts that into the first field in
the Thunderbird address book; then it goes on and sees
VERSION:3.0, tries to split it...

> Have you tried running the vCards through a
> conversion utility to 
> convert everything to UTF-8 before feeding them into
> Thunderbird? If 
> you've tried that, have you tried filtering out the
> CR of the pair? 

I haven't tried filtering CR out of the pair...
...have tried it now, same behaviour.

> > Thanks, now to figure out how to get the .csv
> > AppleScript to work...
> 
> CPAN has modules for that. (I wrote my own, don't
> remember why.) If you 
> write your own, the trick is to arrange the
> precedence of the several 
> quoting mechanisms (remembering, of course, that
> quotes are inferred to 
> quote new lines and commas _and_ escape quotes).

I got the AS to work. It isn't tailored to my needs as
I'd like, but it works fine enough. I'll store away a
perl script that does the same but better for a rainy
day project. Thanks,

~wren


                
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