PC Forms: Characters Following a Tab Are Not Retrieved

• Microsoft Electronic Forms Designer, version 1.0

SYMPTOMS

Electronic forms (E-forms) designed to include text with imbedded tabs will not be able to retrieve the text following the tab character.

CAUSE

This problem occurs if the E-form has used the MEFReadText function to retrieve the string from the E-form package.

RESOLUTION

When you use the E-forms function MEFWriteText to write data directly to an E-forms package, do not use the tab character within character strings.

If you must use tab delimited data in an E-form, the workaround is to use the MEFWriteItem function with the data type of MEF_BINARY. By using the MEF_BINARY type, a different mechanism is used to include the data with the package, and the problem is avoided.

MORE INFORMATION

The implementation of MEFWriteText and MEFReadText is done through calls to WritePrivateProfileString and GetPrivateProfileString. The GetPrivateProfileString function treats the tab character as a separator between the parameter and an optional comment. The comment is not retrieved.

This problem exists on Microsoft Windows for Workgroups and Microsoft Windows 95. The Microsoft Windows NT operating system implements GetPrivateProfileString differently and will return text after the tab character.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q132180
   TITLE     : Using Tabs with Initialization File APIs