NAB the TAB (File Adapter)

“The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.” - Bertrand Russell

So let’s try and clear all doubts and make things sure on the TAB delimited file and hence process them with the file adapter. I hope this blog will prove helpful for all those forum posts on the same.

A TAB delimited file has its fields separated by a TAB. The following screenshot is of a TAB delimited file.

How do you read such a file using the file adapter?

Suppose we have our data type as follows:

Assuming that all other parameters for the sender file adapter has been provided we just focus on the content conversion for the same.

The hexadecimal notation for the TAB is 0x90.

Note:

The hyperlinks http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/cbook/chap1.Codes.html & http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/papers/ascii.html will help us to find the hexadecimal notation for a lot of escape sequences and printable/nonprintable characters.

So we can specify the (substructure).fieldSeparator as ‘0x09’.

Another way to accomplish the same (but a tricky one) is described below.

Open the notepad and press the TAB button once. Copy the space generated and paste it in the content conversion. The following screenshot will throw more light on the same.

To copy the space gererated by the TAB key :