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Extracting All Text from a ProtoTXView Object (4/3/97)

Q: How can I get all the text out of the protoTXView data stored in a soup entry, for example to get the text for sending in email?

A: First, instantiate a dummy view with the data from the soup, as described in the Q&A "How to Get Data From a ProtoTXView Externalized Data". The protoTXView method GetRangeData always allocates its storage from the NewtonScript heap, so you will need to copy the data into a destination VBO in chunks. Here's some code to do that. (This code uses a 4K block size, you may wish to adjust that as necessary, add error checking, etc.) StringFilter is used to remove the protoTXView graphic indicator.

    constant kChunkSize := 0x1000; // 4K chunks
    local start := 0;
    local theText := GetDefaultStore():NewVBO('string, length(""));

    // make VBO into a proper string
    BinaryMunger(theText,0,nil, "", 0, nil);    

    while numChars-start > kChunkSize do
        // strip out graphics characters
        StrMunger(theText,start, nil,
                    StringFilter(
                        textView:GetRangeData(
                            {
                            first: start, 
                            last: start := start + kChunkSize
                            }, 'text),
                        "\u2206\u", 'rejectAll),
                    0, nil);
    // copy remainder
    if start < numChars then
        StrMunger(theText,start,nil,
                    StringFilter(
                        textView:GetRangeData(
                            {first: start, last: numChars}, 'text),
                        "\u2206\u", 'rejectAll),
            0, nil);
    // theText now holds plain text from the protoTXView

For clarity, the code above does not use ClearVBOCache as mentioned in the Q&A, "How to Avoid Resets When Using VBOs". If you are having problems with large VBOs during code like that mentioned above, see that Q&A for more information.