Re: Text on report

[bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx]

>Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 11:44:41 -0700
>From: Jim Langston <jlangston@conexfreight.com>
>
>I have a report to generate that has quite a bit of text on it.
>A whole paragraph, basically.
>
>My question is, how do you feel would be the best way to get
>this long text data into my program to print on the page?
>There are a number of ways I could do it, including puting
>it in a file, then opening it and reading it a line at a
>time into a variable and printing it out.  Or I could do a
>Compile time array and stick it on the bottom of my program.
> ...

Jim, unless you're absolutely positive you'll never want to to
change the text, put it in a file, and just read it line by line.
If you use an array, you have to worry about the exact number
of lines (too many, and you get an error; too few, and you
have to make sure you don't print a blank line).

I'm not sure what the folks suggesting named constants or EVAL
had in mind, but it seems to me that if you code the text as
a single long string, you would have to write extra code to
re-separate it into lines.

>There is another type of array, I think, where I could
>create the file and then load the array with the
>information at run time from the file, though
>I've never done that before.
> ...

What you're referring to here is called a pre-run array.  These
are ok for reading things like messages or month-names where the
number of elements is well-defined, but for text that has a
varying number of lines, they're awkward.

Barbara Morris


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