convert html to text or formatted text from an iphone 4 notes backup sqlite file - iphone

I wanted to restore some of the lost notes that I obtained by using an iTunes backup (of an iphone 4) and opening up the notes.sqlite file. When I query the table that contains the notes text:
select zcontent from znotebody
I get the text that is in html format. How can I convert those entries to a more readable content? It doesnt have to be perfect, just enough to be able to read it. Here is an example of a note:
Meds fir odd<div>Trazadone</div><div>Effexor (& Cd)</div><div>Buspirone</div><div>Clonodine</div><div>Nortriptyline</div><div>Risperdal</div><div>Straterra </div>
Here is the actual note from above:
Meds fir odd
Trazadone
(Effexor & Cd)
Buspirone
Nortriptyline
Risperdal
Straterra<space here>


If you just want to retrieve the note text, I would try this
select "" + zcontent + ""
from znotebody
Then save to a file and open in browser


You have to look some NSString categories, to escape html tags in your text.
Follow this link will help to solve the issue.. Objective C HTML escape/unescape

Related

Writing CR+LF into Open XML from a Database

I'm trying to take some data stored in a database and populate a Word template's Content Controls with it using the Open XML SDK. The data contains paragraphs and so there are carriage return and line feed characters in it. The data is stored in the database as nvarchar.
When I open the generated document, the CR+LF combination shows up as a question mark with a box around it (not sure the name of this character). This is actually two sequences back to back, so CR+LF CR+LF equals two strange characters:
If I unzip the .docx, take the Custom XML part and do a hex dump, I can clearly see 0d0a 0d0a so the CR+LF is there. Word is just printing it weird.
I've tried enforcing UTF-8 encoding in my XmlWriter's settings, but that didn't seem to help:
Dim docStream As New MemoryStream
Dim settings As XmlWriterSettings = New XmlWriterSettings()
settings.Encoding = New UTF8Encoding(False)
Dim docWriter As XmlWriter = XmlTextWriter.Create(docStream, settings)
Does anyone know how I can get Word to render these characters correctly when written to a .docx through the Open XML SDK?

To bind to a Word 2013 rich text control, your XML element has to contain a complete docx. See [MS-DOCX]:
the data stored in the XML element will be an escaped string comprised of a flattened WordprocessingML document representing the formatted data in the structured document tag range.
Earlier versions couldn't bind a rich text control.
Things should work though (with CR/LF, not w:br), if you bind to a plain text control, with multiline set to true.

formatting text in a csv export

I'm having trouble with a .csv export which is being uploaded to a website. There are must be some hidden or illegal characters in a description field I have in the database. I'm having a tough time getting the text to format correctly and not break a php script.
If I use the GetAs(css) function in a calculation, the text works fine. Obviously this won't work as a working file but it at least validates there's something in the formatting of the description field that's breaking the export. I did use the excel clean(text) calculation and that fixes the issue as well. Just need to find a way in Filemaker to do this.
Any suggestions?? Maybe a custom function that strips out bad characters?

You can filter invalid characters out of text using the filter function. If you only want a minimal set of ASCII characters, use it like
filter(mytable::myfield; "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789.!?")

Characters in DB displaying strangely

I'm creating a trivia iPhone app. I've written 1,000 questions or so in the mac app Numbers. The problem I'm having is that when I export the document to a CSV then open it in mySQL lite and save it as a database for the app, things like apostrophes turn out strangely for example "there's" would turn out as thereás instead. Is there any easy way to correct this issue?
Thanks,
Chris

This is happening because you are generating the CSV file from a MS doc or excel file
where
if i write "There’s" in MS Doc(look the apstrophe character)
but if i write same text in a simple text file "There's" (look the changed apstrophe character)
That is why the text is displaying as thereás due to character encoding problem.
So you have to change the (’)character in to (') to display it correctly.

Apostrophe issue in RTF

I have a function within a custom CRM web application (old VB.Net circa 2003) that takes a set of fields from a database and merges them with palceholders in a set of RTF based template documents. These generate merged letters and documentation. The code essentially loops through each line of the RTF template file and replaces any instances of the placeholder values with text from a database record. The issue I'm having is that users have pasted a certain type of apostrophe into the web app (and therefore into the database) that is not rendering correctly in the resulting RTF file. It is rendering like this - ’.
I need a way to spot this invalid apostrophe in the code and replace it with a valid one. Unfortunately when I paste the invalid apostrophe into the Visual Studio editor it gets converted into the correct one. So I need another way to express this invalid apostrophe's value. Unfortunately I do not know a great deal about unicode and other encodings so I'm calling out for help with this.
Any ideas?

If you really just want to figure out what the character is you might want to try and paste it into a text editor like ultraedit. It has a hex mode that you can flip to to see the actual underlying bytes.
In order to do the replace once you've figured out the character you'd do something like this in Vb,
text.Replace(ChrW(2001), "'")
Note that you might not be able to figure it out easily using the text editor because it might also get mangled by paste from the clipboard. You might want to either print some debug of the ascii values from code. You can use the AscW function to do that.
I can't help but think that it may actually simply be a case of specifying the correct encoding to use when you write out the stream though. Assuming you're using a StreamWriter you can specify it on the constructor. I'm guessing you actually want ASCII given your requirement.
oWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(path, False, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)

It looks like you probably want to encode characters out of the 8 bit range (>255).
You can do that using \uNNNN according to the wikipedia article.

How can I extract text from a PDF file in Perl?

I am trying to extract text from PDF files using Perl. I have been using pdftotext.exe from command line (i.e using Perl system function) for extracting text from PDF files, this method works fine.
The problem is that we have symbols like α, β and other special characters in the PDF files which are not being displayed in the generated txt file. Also few extra spaces are being added randomly in the text.
Is there a better and more reliable way to extract text from PDF files such that the text will include all the symbols like α, β etc and the text will exactly match the text in the PDF (i.e without extra spaces)?

These modules you can acheive the extract text from pdf
PDF::API2
CAM::PDF
CAM::PDF::PageText
From CPAN
my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new($filename);
my $pageone_tree = $pdf->getPageContentTree(1);
print CAM::PDF::PageText->render($pageone_tree);
This module attempts to extract sequential text from a PDF page. This is not a robust process, as PDF text is graphically laid out in arbitrary order. This module uses a few heuristics to try to guess what text goes next to what other text, but may be fooled easily by, say, subscripts, non-horizontal text, changes in font, form fields etc.
All those disclaimers aside, it is useful for a quick dump of text from a simple PDF file.

You may never get an appropriate solution to your problem. The PDF format can encode text either as ASCII values with a font applied, or it can encode it as a bitmap. If the tool that created your PDF decided to encode the special characters as a bitmap, you will be out of luck (unless you want to get into OCR solutions, of course).

I'm not a Perl user but I imagine you'll struggle to find a better free text extractor than pdftotext.
pdftotext usually recognises non-ASCII characters fine, is it possible it's extracting them ok but the app you're using to view the text file isn't using the correct encoding? If pdftoetxt on windows is the same as the one on my linux system, then it defaults to exporting as utf-8.

There is getpdftext.pl; part of CAM::PDF.

Well, I tried 2-3 perl modules like CAM::PDF, API2 but the problem remains the same! I'm parsing a pdf file containing main pages. Cam or API2 parses the plain text very well. However, they are not able to parse the code snippet [code snippet usually are in different font & encoding than plain text].

James Healy is correct. After trying CAM::PDF and PDF::API2, the former of which I've had some success reading text, downloading pdftotext worked great for a number of my implementations.
If on windows go here and download xpdf precompiled binary:
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
Then, if you need to run this within perl use system, e.g.,:
system("C:\Utilities\xpdfbin-win-3.04\bin64\pdftotext.exe $saveName");
where $saveName is the full path to your PDF file.
This hopefully leaves you with a text file you can open and parse in perl.

i tried this module which is working fine for special characters of pdf..
!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use PDF::OCR::Thorough;
my $filename = "pdf.pdf";
my $pdf = PDF::OCR::Thorough->new($filename);
my $text = $pdf->get_text();
print "$text";

Take a look at PDFBox. It is a library but i think that it also comes with some tool to do text extracting.