Why does a Text Box not respond properly to a tab char?

[hendra@ngms]

In CVI 7.1, a Text Boxe does not appear to respond properly when sent a tab char. It displays a little box (unknown character). If operated from the keyboard, a text box moves 4 columns when ctrl-tab is entered. This is not exactly like having tab stops, but better than displaying an unknown char symbol.

I need to display tab delimited data ascii files in text boxes.

Is this a bug in the text box control, or is this a request for new capability? Does this need to be fixed and an update sent out?

[Jeremy_L]

Hi,

I just tried this out on my machine and also could not see the tab spacing in the textbox. I also did not see the funny rectangular character you reported. If you can send me a small sample application, I'm planning on making a report of this to our developers and for them to see a sample of your code. Thanks!

[hendra@ngms]

While it would be nice to get this fixed, I implemented a workaround, by brute force scanning all these tab delimited strings into a bunch of string variables, one line at a time, then concatenating them into a string with fixed width fields for each, then writing the new string to the textbox.

Apparently the reason I saw little boxes, was that I had set the Text Box font to Courier, as a fixed width font. Thinking about it, earlier when it had the default metafont selected, there were no little boxes representing the tab, just blanks.

Anyway, it would be nice if a Text Box had tab stops, and properly responded to a tab character in a string written to it.

[Jeremy_L]

Okay, that explains why I couldn't see it. I will go ahead and make a report of this to our developers. In the meantime, that's probably the only feasible workaround. If I find another way, I'll be sure to post it as a knowledgebase. Thanks for your input, and my apologies for the inconvenience.

[JPL6]

Just to mention it, this problem has been around at least from CVI 7.0.

[Ryykker]

Variations of this problem have been around since Moses, or at least since 3.x.x I have never been able to simply write a string containing tabs to a textBox and have it format correctly. I have had to replace tabs (as Jeremy L. said) with embedded spaces.

[hendra@ngms]

Ryykker,

Thanks for the info. Yes, that is what I ended up doing, parsing the string, placing space chars in the right places. Not elegant, but it works.

[josswern]

you say it - I've also been working around this since the 3.x days,
using my own formatting functions to create lines which would look reasonable in text-boxes.
anyways, it would be much better if text boxes had a convenient tab-handling.
so I'll vote for an improvement, too 🙂

[Dubin]

Hello,

why does the TextBox in CVI8.1 doesnt show a rectangle box or any other character?

The tab character will not be displayed. sprintf(x, "Mean\t\n\0")

[Patrick_P.]

Hi Dubin,

The reason that the tab character isn't showing up is because the TextBox in CVI does not have proper support for tab characters (\t).  You will usually see either a blank space or a rectangle depending on the character set used by your current font, but it will not insert a tab.  The only way to do this is to use space characters to simulate the tab as other people on this forum mentioned.  This has been filed to R&D, and we are looking at implementing this in future versions of CVI.