Re: Calling a File for Encryption from outside of the Main Ada-95 Holding Folder.

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Austin Obyrne <austin.obyrne@hotmail.com> writes:

> I have tried Word Pad also and iit works equally well - but as you say
> the file extension .doc is taboo - must not be used - .dat is fine

It's not the file extension, it's the contents of the file! (I realise
that many people would have trouble making the distinction).

> Summarising.
>
> Users can use 'Notepad' with .dat file extension say
> Users can use 'Wordpad' with .dat file extension

It would be more normal to use .txt

> If users insist on using MS Word then it must go through the AdaGIDE
> editor with a .dat file extension (if any).

Or Notepad, or Wordpad .. what you are doing is Copying the contents of
the Word document, and Pasting them into an editor which doesn't
understand Word's style and format information and only accepts the raw
characters. Which is all that you are interested in.

I don't think it's entirely reasonable from your users' point of view to
only be able to deal with plain text files, though; for example, what
about images? (.jpg, etc) which are going to give you the same
problem. Perhaps you could consider reading the files using
Ada.Streams.Stream_IO?

Example use in procedure Output_Contents starting at line 182 of
http://goo.gl/wcqkop