Tab chars in memo fields on form

[madmike]

I have an Access 2010 system that stores program source code. (PostScript, but that is not relevant to this problem) in a table as a memo field. It works fine except that forms showing the source code donn't deal with tab chars by indenting, as one would expect. <CR> and <LF> are fine. But not tab char.

The table contains the tab chars OK (and I can, for example) generate HTML by replacing each tab char by 3 &nbsp; html chars.

But I would like to be able to edit the source code on a form, using a control that deals with the tab char properly, including showing them, indenting, allowing insertion/deletion, ... I can obviously do all that with (for example) Notepad ++. But I need to be able to do it with code in the tables.

Is this possible? And if so, how?

Thanks for any help, Mike

 

[CJ_London]

have you tried setting your memo field to rich text?

 

[madmike]

Yes. If I do that, even the <CR><LF> characters get ignored.

I will prototype the following approach:

1. When a record becomes the current record, convert all <tab> chars to 3 spaces and set 'dirty' to false
2. Allow spaces to be inserted; if any change is made to the field, set dirty to true
3. When the record needs to be saved/closed, check dirty; if it is true, convert spaces back to <tab> characters (after dividing the number of contiguous blanks by 3 of course)

Clumsy. But I think it should work. Obviously, the depth of indexing can be changed by swapping 3 to 4 (for example) in a global database variable.

Does anyone have a simpler solution?
Regards, Mike

 

[CJ_London]

If I do that, even the <CR><LF> characters get ignored.

Rich text uses html code and you can't mix the two

see post#3 in this link for determining the required html code

how to find richtext codes for highlight, underline etc

You might use this with the objective of highlighting searched for text in a text field, or perhaps to format the date and time values in a single field a different colour (although date/time fields would then be text format). Will also work with numbers but they also will be converted to text...

www.access-programmers.co.uk

other thing to try is using vbTab