Easy Data Transform newsletter
04-Sep-2020

Easy Data Transform v1.8.1 released

Easy Data Transform v1.8.1 is now available for Windows and Mac. This release contains bug fixes and improvements.

Find out more and download the new release from the release page:

Download Easy Data Transform v1.8.1

This is a free upgrade to anyone with a v1 license. If you don’t yet have a license, you can buy one here.

Many thanks to everyone that sent in suggestions and bug reports.

Fixed width format files

Customers have been asking us about fixed width text files. Typically these have fixed width columns of text separated by spaces. They tend to be associated with legacy systems, but are also used for large files where performance is an issue (e.g. bioinformatics).

We don’t currently explicitly support fixed width as a format. But you can input fixed width format files into Easy Data Transform with a few extra steps. For example, for this file:

fixed width file

1. Rename the file to have a .txt file extension (if it hasn’t already) and drag it onto Easy Data Transform. Set the delimiter to something that is not used in the text, e.g. caret (^), so that it will import it as 1 column.

import fixed width text file

2. Add a Javascript transform and use the Javascript substring() method to reconstruct the column as delimited text.

parse fixed width file

3. Then add then a Split Col transform to break the delimited text into separate columns.

fixed width text file format

You then may want to Remove Cols the first 2 columns and Trim the remaining columns.

This is a bit of a hassle and it would be nice if Easy Data Transform handled all this automatically. We may add fixed width as an additional input type to make this easier, if enough people are interested. Let us know.

Retrieve your license key online

If you lose your license key, you can now have it resent to the registered email address using the new key retrieval page.

And finally…

We rather like this cartoon by gapingvoid.com.

conspiracy theory

Andy Brice
Oryx Digital Ltd
04-Sep-2020

Questions or problems?

Email support@easydatatransform.com