Last character vanishing

Question
1

I am seeing persistent behaviour where the last character in a column vanishes when I add from Clipboard. So, I have a single column of data where the last line is 166.4. Using Apple’s Edit..Show Clipboard I can see that line intact. Pasting into TextEdit or Numbers I can see that line intact. Using input from Clipboard where the format is interpreted as fixed width by EDT, no further transforms, the 4 vanishes leaving 166. despite the fact that most of the other 3000+ rows also have a four digit number in the form nnn.n and none is truncated.

If I specify Type as Plain text it inputs normally, nothing dropped, so there is a workaround. However it is unclear why Fixed width is dropping the last character of only the last line. Can other people replicate this with a single column of numeric data? The decimal point is immaterial. With integers also the last digit is consistently being dropped for the assumed Fixed width Type.

2

I can reproduce this issue on Mac (but not on Windows). I will investigate. Thanks for reporting it.

3

It looks like it is to do with the line endings.

Standard Mac line endings result in the last character being truncated:

e.g. 166.4\n is truncated

Standard Windows line ending result in the last character being kept:

e.g. 166.4\r\n is not truncated

Where \n is line feed (LF) and \r is carriage return (CR).

If you use Mac line endings then the issue occurs on both Windows and Mac.

I should be able to have a fix for this in the next release.

There also appears to be an issue in pasting in headers, which I will investigate.

As a workaround, you can add a blank line at the end (if that is an option), which is then removed by ignore empty rows.

4

We have fixed the issue. It will be in the next release. Thanks for letting us know.

5

Thank you, pleased it was not a furphy. I spotted it early because the first transform was to copy and offset a column. The rotational fill at the top looked odd, being a decimal with no trailing digit. I was able to correct data along the way, still thinking it was my own error until it showed up from multiple sources.

1 Like