Address Book Adds Carriage Return to Street Field on Import

Question

I've been having some fun and games trying to import a large list of addresses in a tab delimited file into the Address Book. After finally managing to sort out all the issues with importing the file, I have now discovered that the value for the Street in all of the imported addresses has a carriage return (\r) character appended to them. There was not a carriage return present in the tab delimited file.
I doublechecked the Address Book entries using Applescript to inspect the final character of the Street field and it was indeed a carriage return.
I presume that this is due to the mapping of fields in the Address Book to the columns in my file. The Address Book allows you to enter 2 values for the Street, yet I am only using the first one with the second one being set to be ignored.
However, the import still adds the carriage return character despite the second Street field not being required. It's not obvious that this is happening when viewing entries in the Address Book, yet when it comes to printing the imported addresses onto labels, a blank line is left due to the empty second Street field.
If I edit the card and amend the Street field to, say, add a comma to the end of the Street or, take it away, the problem disappears. I don't want to manually edit all the imported address of which I have 275. Is there a workaround for this, or some Applescript that will automatically edit all the Street entries to remove the carriage return?
Is anyone else experiencing this? Could this be classified as a bug?
Before someone suggests I use the thirdparty Address Book Importer, I have tried that too and it also results in the same problem.
Stuart
Mac mini   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

The blank line appears when looking at the addresses through applications like SOHO Labels and Envelopes or Imprint. The problem is that the carriage return is added by the Address Book as it is being imported, rather than the carriage return being there already, so loading the tab delimited file into a spreadsheet will not show any carriage return characters.
In the end I cooked up some Applescript to go through the Address Book and strip out any trailing carriage returns from the Street field for all addresses. I'm no Applescript guru, but the following seemed to do the trick:
tell application "Address Book"
set thePeople to every person
repeat with thePerson in thePeople
set theAddresses to every address of thePerson
repeat with theAddress in theAddresses
set streetinfo to street of theAddress
if streetinfo ends with "\r" then
set streetinfo2 to (text of characters 1 thru -2 of (streetinfo as string) as string)
set street of theAddress to streetinfo2
end if
end repeat
end repeat
save addressbook
end tell
The other alternative was to write a script to parse my file in something like Ruby and then use Applescript to add the records rather than use the Address Book import feature. That would probably have given me some flexibility with being able to add multi-line notes, but the above was quicker to hack together.
Stuart
Mac mini (PPC)   Mac OS X (10.4.6)