Help with text files

[elisha cuthbert]

Can someone please tell me how to combine multiple text files into something like a pages, word or text edit document?
please help me asap

 

[janey]

Can someone please tell me how to combine multiple text files into something like a pages, word or text edit document?
please help me asap

What do you mean by that? You can copy/paste..but can you be specific about formats and what you mean by combining?

 

[UKnjb]

Can someone please tell me how to combine multiple text files into something like a pages, word or text edit document?
please help me asap

Um -, if I am undertanding you correctly and you can/want to do it in Word -

Open a new blank document in Word.
1. From the Menu bar, Insert > File /select the first file you want to add.
2. Put the cursor at the end of the document.
3. [If you want to keep all of the imported files separate, Insert > Break > Page break]
4. Go to 1. and repeat for all the rest of the files.
5. Format etc.
6. Save the new document

Is this what you wanted to do? Hope it helps.

 

[elisha cuthbert]

What do you mean by that? You can copy/paste..but can you be specific about formats and what you mean by combining?

formats .wrd,.pages,.rtf,.txt
combining: the act of combining things to form one thing

and i was thinking more of doing it without going through copy/paste 4 dozen times

 

[janey]

formats .wrd,.pages,.rtf,.txt
combining: the act of combining things to form one thing

and i was thinking more of doing it without going through copy/paste 4 dozen times

yeah, but are they all plaintext files that you want all in one without formatting, or what?

if they're all text files that need to be dumped into one, you can open Terminal.app and type in "cat " (with a space after) and drag/drop all the files in there, and add " > /Users/username/place/to/put/file/filename.txt" to the end, replace username and /place/to/put/file/filename.txt with the appropriate names, and it'll dump it all together for ya.

However, the above does not work if they're not plain text files (.txt), as .doc and the other formats have some extra padding (info about the document) that cant be all jammed together like that.

 

[elisha cuthbert]

yeah, but are they all plaintext files that you want all in one without formatting, or what?

if they're all text files that need to be dumped into one, you can open Terminal.app and type in "cat " (with a space after) and drag/drop all the files in there, and add " > /Users/username/place/to/put/file/filename.txt" to the end, replace username and /place/to/put/file/filename.txt with the appropriate names, and it'll dump it all together for ya.

However, the above does not work if they're not plain text files (.txt), as .doc and the other formats have some extra padding (info about the document) that cant be all jammed together like that.

Ok thanks heaps for that, they are all in rtf format but ill start using txt so i can use terminal for it cause it sounds easy ( and ive always wanted a reason to have terminal in my dock)

 

[janey]

Ok thanks heaps for that, they are all in rtf format but ill start using txt so i can use terminal for it cause it sounds easy ( and ive always wanted a reason to have terminal in my dock)

well the one big downside to that is that you don't get any formatting with regular plain text files. it certainly is easy, but make sure you have newlines at the end so all the text doesn't get smushed together, like
"This is the end of one file.This is the start of another file".

 

[elisha cuthbert]

well the one big downside to that is that you don't get any formatting with regular plain text files. it certainly is easy, but make sure you have newlines at the end so all the text doesn't get smushed together, like
"This is the end of one file.This is the start of another file".

Ok thanks for the help

 

[elisha cuthbert]

Problem Solved

I just opened pages and thought about drag/drop and draged all the .rtf files onto a blank document and it just put all the text there so everyone that contributed thank you

 

[Si1965]

yeah, but are they all plaintext files that you want all in one without formatting, or what?

if they're all text files that need to be dumped into one, you can open Terminal.app and type in "cat " (with a space after) and drag/drop all the files in there, and add " > /Users/username/place/to/put/file/filename.txt" to the end, replace username and /place/to/put/file/filename.txt with the appropriate names, and it'll dump it all together for ya.

However, the above does not work if they're not plain text files (.txt), as .doc and the other formats have some extra padding (info about the document) that cant be all jammed together like that.

I know I'm resurrecting a 2-year old thread but I found the above immensely useful, however the text files I am interested in combining each have a unique identifying number used as the file name. Is there any way in which i can combine the text files and append the file name to each at the same time i.e. so that the file name is alongside the relevant text.