Hi Dave

What I would try:

1. Read the file as text line.
2. Trim the lines.
3. Get rid of empty lines: simply by Attribute has a value / Attribute Is Empty String.
4. StringSearcher: extract the digits from the end using the RegExp \\d+$ (\\d: digit, +: any number - of digits, $: at the end)
5. Copy the original string to a new attrib
6. With StringReplacer (or other way) replace the extracted digits from the copied attribute
7. (Sort if you need to)
8. Aggregator: group by this new attribute, concatenate the original string attrib.

Is this what you mean?

Cheers,

András

Ok, I persisted with Variables and sorted it out.

Test for a blank line, send this to the counter and then set a variable to the count value. On the failed port of the Tester, use a VariableRetriever to get the count value and glue it onto the features that pass through. Everytime a row with nothing on it is seen, the count ID increments. Then just use the Aggregator to group on the count ID and do the concatenation.

Thanks for listening, I helps to talk it through :0)

I had a different approach:

Replace empty lines with a character that won't occur in your dataset, then aggregate them all and specify that they should be concatenated, split on that character, explode the list, cleanup a bit et voila! Hope this helps.

concat-text.fmwt

I'd assign a value to the blank lines and then use the adjacent feature support in the attribute creator to increment a group number after every blank line, then aggregate/concatenate based on this value

Hi @1spatialdave, assuming that a newline is represented by two special characters - [cr] (\\r) and [lf] (\\n), this might also be a possible way.

1. Text File reader: Read whole file at once.
2. StringReplacer (1): Replace two consecutive newlines i.e. [cr][lf][cr][lf] with a specific special character e.g. [bel] (\\a).
3. StringReplacer (2): Replace every remaining newline with a white space.
4. StringReplacer (3): Replace the special character [bel] with a single newline.

@1spatialdave

If spaces are the only criteria...

..i'm pretty sure this question or similar has been sked before.

My workspaces-collection has bunches of variableretriever/setter variants..

The moral to the story is that the FME User community is awesome and... there's 14 ways to do anything in FME. Thanks all very much, neat solutions.