Gareth Horton
August 5th, 2002, 03:58 PM
Q: Will Monarch read file formats besides ASCII?
A: Monarch Standard reads ASCII and ANSI text, Monarch Pro will also read MDB, XLS, DBF,DB, WKS, WK1, WK3, WK4, delimited text and ODBC data sources. Monarch Pro Version 6 also reads HTML files.
ASCII vs. ANSI
Most report files are created as ASCII text files, but report files generated from Windows applications may be created as ANSI text files.
The difference lies with characters 128 - 255. In these positions, the ANSI character set includes international characters not present in the ASCII character set.
When Monarch reads a report file, it assumes that the file is ASCII and it converts the file to ANSI. If the file is already in ANSI format this conversion is not required.
Monarch V3.05 and higher support a default setting called InputCharacterSet that specifies the report file format, either ASCII or ANSI. The first time you install Monarch, the InputCharacterSet is set to ASCII. If your report files are ANSI you may change this setting to ANSI.
See the Monarch On-Line Reference Guide for details.
Delimited ASCII and dBase III Formats
In addition to its built-in support for ANSI report files, Monarch also provides a utility to convert Delimited ASCII files and dBase III files to ASCII text format.
If you work with report data in either of these formats, see the section titled "Prep Utility" in your Monarch Reference Guide(Monarch V3) or your Monarch On-Line Reference Guide (Monarch V4 and higher).
You may want to consider using Monarch Pro, which supports both of these formats natively.
A: Monarch Standard reads ASCII and ANSI text, Monarch Pro will also read MDB, XLS, DBF,DB, WKS, WK1, WK3, WK4, delimited text and ODBC data sources. Monarch Pro Version 6 also reads HTML files.
ASCII vs. ANSI
Most report files are created as ASCII text files, but report files generated from Windows applications may be created as ANSI text files.
The difference lies with characters 128 - 255. In these positions, the ANSI character set includes international characters not present in the ASCII character set.
When Monarch reads a report file, it assumes that the file is ASCII and it converts the file to ANSI. If the file is already in ANSI format this conversion is not required.
Monarch V3.05 and higher support a default setting called InputCharacterSet that specifies the report file format, either ASCII or ANSI. The first time you install Monarch, the InputCharacterSet is set to ASCII. If your report files are ANSI you may change this setting to ANSI.
See the Monarch On-Line Reference Guide for details.
Delimited ASCII and dBase III Formats
In addition to its built-in support for ANSI report files, Monarch also provides a utility to convert Delimited ASCII files and dBase III files to ASCII text format.
If you work with report data in either of these formats, see the section titled "Prep Utility" in your Monarch Reference Guide(Monarch V3) or your Monarch On-Line Reference Guide (Monarch V4 and higher).
You may want to consider using Monarch Pro, which supports both of these formats natively.