I have a plain text file generated by our EMR (verified via hex dump: pure printable ASCII, standard CRLF line endings, no control characters, no BOM). Report-style layout with right-aligned dollar amounts around columns 70–80.
In the DataMapper (fresh mapper, text input, default settings — also tried a copied mapper, same result), the amount values don’t render in the data viewer at all. If I enable Selection Type is based on bites, the values appear but the column spacing condenses past readability.
Sample line (spaces condensed): BALANCE FORWARD ... -90.00 — the label shows, the -90.00 doesn’t.
What is the viewer doing here, and what’s the correct input setting for this kind of report file?
Assuming you are setting your data field to be of type Currency, make sure the Currency sign option in the field’s Data format section is empty if none are present in your data file.
Also, make sure the Negative Sign Before option is ticked, since your sample data indicates some amounts might be negative. Note that text data may include a few different ways of representing the negative sign (-), some of which might confuse the DataMapper. If that’s the case, then you could use a Post function on your data selection to replace the character with a standard dash (the Post function gets evaluated before the data is actually converted to the final data format, so you can use standard string-replacement routines).
Also, take a look at Messages pane to see if there are any hints or errors reported in there.
If all else fails, set the Data type to Text, to make sure the actual extraction takes place properly. If it does, then we’ll know for sure it’s the conversion to currency that’s problematic