Hello Patti,

It is unusual to hear of software that will not let you enter  
paragraph breaks into a lengthy text field, so I can't immediately  
think of any canonical format for replacing them. I would suggest  
that you could pick pretty much any replacement characters that you  
want, provided that they meet two criteria:

1) They should not be easily confused with ordinary text in the notes.
2) You must use them consistently throughout your project.

If you do those two things, you would be able to automatically  
exchange the replacement characters for proper paragraph breaks in  
the future, if your needs change.

Here are a few recommendations:

!@#$ - Has the advantage of being easy to spot in the text, and  
shouldn't be confused for real text unless your John Doe swears a lot.

CRLF - This is an initialism for "Carriage Return, Line Feed" which  
are the control characters that represent a paragraph break in many  
computers anyway. Any database manager that works with your data will  
immediately know what this means.

\r\n - Another common way that computers represent "Carriage Return,  
Line Feed". Note that those are backslashes, not forward slashes.

Best regards,
Brian Bisbee


On Aug 15, 2006, at 4:31 PM, Patti Davis-Perkins wrote:

> A question from a colleague.  Subject matter is irrelevant.  Is  
> there a “rule” that exists for this type of data entry situation.
>
>
> I’m working right now on a project where I have to copy and paste  
> some information in the Narrative field. These are the notes from  
> “John Doe” and in his text, I have paragraphs. I need to show where  
> the paragraph ends and starts without having to do “enter”. So I  
> put a lot of spaces to show where the paragraph breaks. I never  
> count how many spaces I make, as long as I can see where it breaks,  
> then I though I was fine.
>
>
> So today, I have been told that we should only put one or two  
> spaces, but I explained that it would not show the paragraph  
> breaks. Then, I have been told to make the “/”, but sometime I  
> already have “/” in my text so it would be confusing.
>
>
> My question is, how do you do your data entry in a Notes field to  
> show where the paragraph breaks? Should we set a rule for all the  
> notes fields?
>
>
>
> Thanks for your advise!
>
> Patti
>
>
>
> Patricia Davis-Perkins | Documentaliste, Multimédia | Musée  
> canadien des civilisations | 100, rue Laurier, C.P. 3100,  
> succursale B, Gatineau (Québec), J8X 4H2 | 1.819.776.8456 |  
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> Patricia Davis-Perkins | Multimedia Documentalist | Canadian Museum  
> of Civilization | 100 Laurier Street, P.O. Box 3100, Station B,  
> Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, J8X 4H2 | 1.819.776.8456 | patti.davis- 
> [log in to unmask]
>
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