Substring Problem

daithi · Aug 16th, 2007, 10:01

Hi
I pretty new to this, but I need help badly. I'm using a browse button on a html page which selects a file. The file is not for upload I just require the path. What I want to be able to do is crop the file path from the last backslash and replace it with text of my choice.
eg
file path - D:\tomcat\webapps\mailer2\home.jpg
do to - D:\tomcat\webapps\mailer2\
result - D:\tomcat\webapps\mailer2\logo.jpg

I think it might be done with the substring function but I really dont know. I cant figure it out from the docs. Any help would be great thanks!
Cheers
Daithi

QuikFrozen · Aug 24th, 2007, 01:32

Hi there:
Well, it's not that hard to do, but there are some issues that you might take into consideration.
First, since you're designing a web, you should considerate other user might use a different operating system (like from the Unix family) and the path to files on those other systems is different from that weird one on windows. For example if the path comes from a Linux machine, you won't be looking for a backslash, but for a simple slash.
The second thing is: where do you want to do this file-cropping? Is it server-side or client-side? and if server-side, what language are you using? With this info I could give you the code so you can do the cropping you want.

Waiting for your response...

daithi · Aug 24th, 2007, 07:53

The web app is going to be exclusively used within an intranet in a company. Therefore its safe to assume that all the users are Windows based. To answer your second question, ideally the browse cropping is taking place client side. Java/Javascript is the coding language used. I've been looking for a solution for this for quite a while, any help would be great.
Thanks

QuikFrozen · Aug 28th, 2007, 14:02

Ok man, here's a small javascript I just wrote with a little html so you realize what's happening :

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Backslash</tilte>
<script type="text/javascript">
function doCrop(text){
var file=document.getElementById("myfile").value;
if(file!=""){
crop(file,text);
}
else{
alert("must select a file");
}
}
function crop(file,newText){
var slash;
var temp=file.indexOf("\\");
//get the last backslash
while(temp>=0){
slash=temp+1;
temp=file.indexOf("\\",slash);
}
if(slash>=0){
//here you can do whatever you want to the path
file=file.substring(0,slash)+newText;
alert(file);
}
else{
alert("bad file format");
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<input type="file" id="myfile" />
<input type="button" name="mybutton" value="Go" onclick="doCrop('main.jsp');"/>
</body>
</html>

daithi · Aug 30th, 2007, 12:15

Cheers for that works a treat. I made one slight adjustment just so you know.
I changed the method getElementById to getElementsByName. It seems to work better.
Thanks again!