displaying large amounts of text

[Henning Wallgren]

Hi all,

I have a lot of text that I want to display in a textbox on my form.
Instead of hardcoding it in, which would be a nightmare, I have typed it in
a .txt format. Besides readng the file, parsing it and displaying
it in a multi-line textbox, is there any other ways of doing this, or what
do you do to display lots of text?


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Henning

[Eddy Van Esch]

the main question is: do you want to store that long text inside your exe or
do you want to read it from a file. you mentioned the last possibility yourself, so i
assume you want to store the text inside your exe.
when writing a short program, i usually store the helptext in the exe itself. that
way i have a single executable file.
an example of this you can find on the source code forum: http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=23072
it is my project timer.
i usually use 'binbas' or 'file2asm' to transform a textfile into data statements (binbas)
or inline assembler statements (file2asm). you can then simply read the text
into a string and display this into your richedit box or plain text box.
the 2 mentioned routines are by the hand of fellow pb programmers and can be found
in these forums.
hope this helps.
kind regards
eddy

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[email protected]

[this message has been edited by eddy van esch (edited october 02, 2001).]

[Gregery D Engle]

Just include it as a resource, much easier for editing purposes.

I would hate using BinBas everytime I changed the file.

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-Greg

[Henning Wallgren]

Greg,

I like the idea of putting it into a resource file. I've put icons
in resource files before, but not large amounts of text. What would
I write in the rc file to separate 5 text-references?

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Henning

[Borje Hagsten]

Think text in resource files becomes double-byte, that is, twice as big
when compiled. Usually, easiest and most convinient to use standard way,
via text file.


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[Lance Edmonds]

yes, string table text is stored in unicode which doubles the size of the ansi strings you are likely to be storing.

however, saving it as a "binary resource" would remove this problem.

the .rc file entry would look like this:

mydata  rcdata  "textfile.txt"

search the bbs for "rcdata" and you should find some examples on reading the data from the embedded resource file.

for example: http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=22630


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lance
powerbasic support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</a>

[Chris Boss]

Henning;

Using the RichEdit control works best, since you can load the control
with RTF (Rich Text Format) text. Use Wordpad to format the text,
save the file as an RTF file. Read the RTF file from a disk file
in your app and pass the text to the Rich Edit control.

If you are using DDT or SDK style code you will need to use the
EM_STREAMIN message. This message requires creating a function
call of which you will pass an address to the rich edit control.
Using this message allows you to load megabytes of RTF (or ascii) text
into the control. Even on Windows 95, you can load megabytes into
the rich edit control.


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[This message has been edited by Chris Boss (edited October 02, 2001).]

[Henning Wallgren]

Thanks Lance,

I looked at the code, got the text into my .pbr file. Scratching
my head over retrieving the data from the resource. This sample by
Semen is kind of getting me on the way, but ...

I am using the '|' sign as delimiter for my paragraphs. Would it be possible to
get the whole file into one string and parse it?

DataAddr = LOADRESOURCE(BYVAL 0,BYVAL FINDRESOURCE(BYVAL 0&,_
           "REGINFO",BYVAL %RT_RCDATA))
    DIM I AS LONG
    FOR I=1 TO %DataCount
        DataItem = @DataAddr[i-1] + DataAddr:MSGBOX @DataItem
    NEXT

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Henning

[Henning Wallgren]

Thanks Chris!

I changed it to a RichText control, parsed the filed the way I waneted
and loaded it into my six boxes.

btw if someone has a code to retrieve the text from the resource
into a string, I'd appreciate it.



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Henning

[Clay Clear]

    DIM L1 AS LONG
    DIM L2 AS LONG
    DIM SBuffer AS STRING
    DIM D1 AS DWORD
    '
    L1 = FindResource(hInst, BYVAL %ID, BYVAL %RT_RCDATA
    'If you NAMED your resource, use the name instead of BYVAL %ID:
    L1 = FindResource(hInst, "MYDATA", BYVAL %RT_RCDATA
    'If you use an integer identifier, put the numebr in place
    'of %ID
    L1 = FindResource(hInst, BYVAL 101, BYVAL %RT_RCDATA)
    IF L1 = %NULL THEN ERROR 101
    L2 = LoadResource(hInst, L1)
    IF L2 = %NULL THEN ERROR 102
    D1 = LockResource(L2)
    IF D1 = %NULL THEN ERROR 103
    SBuffer = PEEK$(D1, 11111)
    'Replace 11111 with the actual size of the resource (the size of
    'of the file stored as the resource)
    'Note that hInst is the Instance of the process owning the
    'resource. I don't know if this method would work with
    'LoadLibrary/FreeLibrary
    'Once you've read the resource into the string variable (in this
    'case, SBuffer), you may then use it in whichever way you
    'require for your program
    'I use this method to create autoextracting, autoinstalling
    'EXE's to distribute my custom DLL's that my Public Release
    'programs use  [img]http://www.powerbasic.com/support/forums/smile.gif[/img]
    'LockResource returns the address of the actual memory
    'location where the resource is stored
    'Note that you do NOT have to Unlock the resource in 32-bit
    'Windows, according to Win32.hlp

Hope this helps!

Regards,


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Clay C. Clear

Clay Clear's Software
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Henning Wallgren]

Thanks Clay!



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Henning