How to remove RTF-formatting

[SanderEhmsen]

Hi all

I am working on SAS 9.4 M3 (SYSVLONG4 = 9.04.01M3P06242015) and have encountered input data formatted with RTF formatting. 

It has quite a few structures as it can origin through several different channels. So there are for me to see no quick and dirty fixes.

My data can look something like this:

{\rtf1\fbidis\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}{\f1\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Calibri;}}
{\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;}
\viewkind4\uc1 d\ltrpar\cf1\lang1030\f0\fs22 *REAL TEXT*
d\ltrpar\sa200\sl276\slmult1\cf0\f1 *REAL TEXT*
d\ltrpar\cf1\f0
}

Where *REAL TEXT* indicates what I am really interested in. 

Are any of you familiar with a SAS function (eg user written) or SAS MACRO that can actually do this stripping of RTF-formating? 

Best,

Sander Ehmsen, Denmark.

[andreas_lds]

RTF is an output format, i would refuse to write a program that parses RTF.

It could be possible to remove the formatting by using some regular expressions, but i don't know enough about rtf to suggest something that actually does that job.

Does the interesting part always start after the first blank?

[SanderEhmsen]

Refusing is probably not an acceptable solution here. I have tried to find manually find patterns in the RTF-code like finding the first blank. I can get something like 90% right by this method. But the last 10% ends up miserably :-).

[Kurt_Bremser]

Depending on your environment, use VBA (Windows with MS Office) or shell scripting with OpenOffice (all open platforms) to load the rtf and save it as .txt.

[SanderEhmsen]

Thank you for your suggestion.

Our SAS soon runs on a Linux platform. And my Data Custodians has refused to implement a RTF-parser on that platform.

So according to them it is not feasible.

Best, 

Sander.

[Kurt_Bremser]

---

@SanderEhmsen wrote:

Thank you for your suggestion.

Our SAS soon runs on a Linux platform. And my Data Custodians has refused to implement a RTF-parser on that platform.

So according to them it is not feasible.

Best, 

Sander.

---

Tell them to look up "Mordac the Preventer".

[RW9 · Accepted solution]

You really are not going to get anywhere with this I am afraid.  There are no simple methods to parsing an rtf file into something usable.  Many have tried, I have tried, all have got some ways and given up.  

The file itself is a markup language, and there are loads of tags:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10725

That is the latest spec.  Now you could write a parser, take each tag, find closing tag (if there is one), and perl may help somewhat.  But it is a big undertaking.  Even output generated from SAS which is pretty low in terms of rtf, can be very different between different systems and such like.

I have also looked as well at what @Kurt_Bremser mentioned, using another program to convert to another file format.  And there are ways to get html, or text output.  However even that, unless its a very simple file, really isn't much help.  Tabular output for instance - which a lot of SAS output is - doesn't have any indication of position.  RTF is literally one page at a time, cell by cell.  So you first need to parse the header blocks, then do page by page, extract the information, then set it all together.

I would go back to the source data, it is the best, and with limited time, the only feasible method.

[SanderEhmsen]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I have contacted my data provider. And maybe they can strip it in their end.

I might do some tranwrd() and remove the most common RTF code. It will not get all the way. But it might be better for my end users.

[RW9]

Yes, they must have some raw data they used to generate the RTF, so that is the best method.