import text clips?
 

Let's say I want to export data from another program (such as zoot) into ultrarecall.

I can dump all the data into a web page, for example, with subject delimeters or other text to denote item breaks. Any way to drag that text into ultrarecall and UR recognize the item breaks in some way, to generate multiple items?

This would make getting info into UR much more flexible. Thanks.

Not currently. We are considering providing an import option to paste text and create an item for each line of text (rather than a single item with all the text), but extending this to support HTML with some type of markers would be quite a bit more involved. Text might be more feasible than HTML, but even then, I'm not sure if there is a standard format to define delimiters for separating items within it (perhaps OPML?).

Straight text would be fine.

In Zoot, for example, you can past text extracts to create items. A window asks for an item delimter (you type in whatever it is) and an optional subject delimeter (again type it in). There's optional choices to strip out the delimeters when you're creating the items too.

Fine by me if you standardize these delimeters in some way.


The advantage of this import option is that there's lots of db content that can be exported into text in the way, and it would allow folks to adopt ultra recall that much more easily. Right now, I have lots of content elsewhere, and I can't quite pull them in except as one large file, which loses a lot of the information's granular value. Searching again within the item for the proper hit is cumbersome.

Thanks for considering this.

How are the delimiters entered? Can newlines be part of a delimiter? Can you post a couple sample text files, indicating the delimiters that would be specified and how you would expect them to be parsed into items/titles/text? Also, what are some apps that export in this 'extract' format? Thanks.

At the bottom is a cut and paste of the help file entry from zoot.

So imagine I have a spreadsheet filled with items. Let's say each row is a separate item. It wouldn't be very hard to paste everything into word, then replace all carriage returns with some odd text string such as "~end~". Then I could select all, copy, then paste "text extracts" into the "data explorer" view in zoot. Then a dialog box pops up asking what the delimter is. I would type in "~end~", etc.

Then I have a bunch of new items, not just one item with all the spreadsheet entries.

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User Specified Delimiter
This option lets you import a file using some other delimiter with which to extract items. In this case, Zoot displays a Delimited File Dialog so that you can specify a delimiter. A delimiter is any unique string of characters that marks the end of one item and the beginning of the next. In many cases you can specify a series of carriage returns (CRLF) as your delimiter. In other words, you can use "white space" as a delimiter.

When Zoot displays the Delimited File Dialog, follow these steps:

1. The Delimited File Dialog features two large edit boxes. The edit box on the top is where you enter the delimiter that marks the end of one item and beginning of the next. Zoot will use this delimiter to split the file into individual items.



2. In the edit box on the bottom you can specify another delimiter that Zoot will use to locate an intelligent name for the items created during the import process. This delimiter is optional, but if you're importing a file full of e-mail messages, for instance, you might want to specify "Subject:" as a delimiter so that Zoot will pick up the subject line of each e-mail message.



3. For each of the delimiters you can choose to have the delimiter itself omitted. This is useful if the delimiter you're using consists of "white space" or garbage characters.



When you're finished specifying your delimiters, click the OK button and Zoot will execute the file import.

If you import a long document into Zoot!, you can have Zoot! break it into smaller documents. Instead of a 50-page document, you can have five, each of ten pages. I don't recall how flexible Zoot! is in allowing you to vary the number of parts into which a document is chopped. I don't think any program except Zoot! does this and whether the rarity of the feature reflects difficulties in programming it.

Version 1.3 of Ultra Recall has recently been released which provides the import capability requested in this thread.

Use File | Import | A text or rich text (RTF) file to import either plain or rich text with a variety of delimiter styles.