How to convert an access field to HTML

[Guest]

Hi, I wonder if anyone is able to assist or point me in the right direction?
I have an access database containing 3,000 products for our on-line store.
The data will be exported to Excel and then uploaded to our site and Access
is being used to ease the input mechanism, however, it is a requirement that
one of the fields has to be in HTML format ( this is the 'long description'
of the product ). Does anyone know how I could easily convert an Access field
into HTML? ( Preferably from Rich Text so that bulleting etc works! ). I have
tried some of the available shareware options but would really welcome some
suggestions!! Many thanks.

 

[Scott McDaniel]

What do you mean by convert it to HTML? Do you mean add tags like <strong>
etc based on info embedded in the memo field? If so, that could be quite a
big job. You mention 3rd party tools - if this were my project, I believe
I'd keep looking ...RTF formats are not all equal, but if all these items
came from the same source (like you used a MSForms RTB to populate them)
then you could perhaps find documentation on the various tags and such used,
map them to the equivalent HTML tags, and then simply use a bunch of
Replace("", "") called in sequence. If nothing else, this would get you
further along than when you started. You'll probably still have some hand
massaging to do.

 

[Guest]

Hi Scott,

Many thanks! I do mean add tags. Basically the shop software requires one
field ( the long description ) to be in HTML format. This is a serious pain
with some 3,000 products to list! The actual format for the initial bulk
upload is an Excel Spreadsheet - subsequent amendments are made from within
the software. It is only the one field that needs to be in HTML format ( less
headers etc ) and I'm looking for an easy way to achieve this ( given the
number of products ). At the moment I seem to be stuck with creating the
layout and content within an HTML editor and then cutting and pasting - not
terribly elegant and very time consuming. It is also a real pain to amend
anything! This is, hopefully, a one off process but with the current
mechanism it could take til Christmas!

 

[Scott McDaniel]

I had some experience with a similar situation, a legacy system that had
stored information in RTF. I was hired to upgrade the application, and one
requirement was to remove the RTF fomratting from that field and convert it
to straight text, and basically I was able to simple strip the RTF
formatting commands from the field ... there were about 7500 records that
had to be processed, the code I wrote simply looped through the recordset
and opened the field in a 3rd party Memo control and grabbed the Text from
that control. This wouldn't help you, of course, since that would strip all
your fomatting ... but before taking this approach, I had written code that
looped through the recordset and stripped the RTF tags with the Replace
command ... I had to spend a good bit of time examining the particular RTF
format, reviewing documentation on RTF (which is somewhat scarce), etc etc
....

 

[Guest]

I should also point out that I would be quite happy to be able to enter the
data in WYSIWYG format on the form and it be saved to HTML format - i.e.
there is no data there currently so the only requirement is for the data in
this field to be in HTML format ( if that makes sense! )