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[sinjon]

I've created a small edit macro to automate a sequence of edit commands that I often manually enter. Everything works fine except for there's one command I don't know how to automate. Intereactively I'd use the MD (make data) command and I don't know how to incorporate that command into the macro.

For example, if interactively I always go to the fifth line and enter 'md30' to turn any notes or message lines within the next 30 lines into data, how would I do that from within a macro?

[semigeezer]

Unfortunately, youj can't automate that through a simple edit macro. There is no macro access to 'special' lines like info or note lines. Only data lines are addressable.

[sinjon]

I don't actually want to do any specific processing of just the notes or info lines, just save them as data lines so they can then be processed like the rest of the data. No way to do theat through a macro... seems odd since it so simple manually...

Thanks for your reply

[stefan]

You could write a macro which captures the contents of the current screen, parse it, and process as you need.

[semigeezer]

If you are going to go down that route, then the complete solution is to create an edit panel with a panel exit that captures and updates the zdata variable with the right commands and screen attribute bytes. But that still requires getting the screen to display each non-data line (scrolling) which is very hard to simulate from a macro.

Panel exits that interogate or manupulate edit data are possible -- I've written exits that remove or alter the line command area for use by screen readers for example -- but they are non-trivial and not easy to maintain.

The other way is to write an emulator macro. With a good emulator language (EHLLAPI or Vista's macro language for example, that would not be not too hard.

But edit macros themselves can't do it through any documented interface.

[sinjon]

Well considering that I'll be dealing with thousands of lines, capturing the screen won't work. Perhaps in a loop, but I think it'd take too long with the size of the data set.

[semigeezer]

Here is a thought...

1. Manually MD all lines, MD9999 or if you have >9999 lines,
   1. X ALL
   2. MD on the excluded line
   3. RESET X
2. COMPARE SESSION or COMPARE * (those are the same thing)
3. That will give you a set of labeled lines where the new lines are. Then your macro can go through those lines and process them as needed, deleting the ones you don't want.

You can either calculate the label names (you'll see the pattern when you look at the labels, .Oxxxx where xxxx is a cycle AAAA, AAAB, ... AAAZ, AABA, AABB, etc , basically xxxx is a base26 'number' using alphabetic characters), or use LOCATE LABEL and the DISPLAY_LINES, something like this:

[semigeezer]

I think there is a better way to calculate the labels, but this small genlabel routine will do it: