Numbers '09 2.1 - setting import delimiter for .txt or .rtf

Question

Hi there -
I have a series of text files with leading numbers that I'd like to remove. The files are lists, where each line is enumerated sequentially & these line-numbers have to be removed for further processing.
This is too painful to do manually (takes forever), but the content is not in English and so Excel, which allows me to set the delimited & correctly parses the information, doesn't read the content properly (even after copy paste into a word processor that usually does) whereas Pages will handle the content, but for the life of me I can't get it to parse the information - so it's effectively useless.
The other threads I've read basically suggest that one has to manually insert tabs between the fields - is this actually the case? Is there really no way to control how Pages '09 parses imported data?
As a final add-on: I know this would be relatively easy to do with a script, but I havne't a clue where to get started with scripting for the Mac, so if you read this & have a suggestion as to where I might get started (generally, or w.r.t. this particular project), I would very much appreciate the enlightenment.
Thanks in advance and all the best,
Rax

Answer 1

If the leading numbers are separated from the rest of lines by space character, you file is not a tab delimited one.
If a file whose name ends with .txt is a tab delimited one, it may be opened by Numbers with no problem.
If its name ends with .csv, thingsa re more complicated.
If the system use the period as decimal separator, the values MUST be separated by commas
but
if the system use the comma as decimal separator, the values MUST be separated by semi-colons.
I have a possible understanding of your problem.
Maybe values are separated by single or several spaces which is the awful format used in the typewriter era.
I guess that with this structure, Excel use its knowledge of English language to split the lines.
As I don't like to work in the Terminal, I wrote a short script achieving what you described.
--{code}
set fichier_source to choose file with prompt "Select a text file" of type {"public.plain-text"}
set le_fichier to POSIX path of (fichier_source as text)
do shell script "sed -i.bak -e 's/^[0-9]* *//' " & quoted form of le_fichier
tell application "Pages"
  open le_fichier
end tell
--{code}
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 25 octobre 2011 00:03:57
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
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