Delphi: how to trim a excel range

Question

Although I am a great fan of stackoverflow and I found several good solutions, this is my first question. I am writing a Delphitool (D6... old but still working!) for making it easier to administrate our students at school.

Delphi reads some (even older...) Visual Foxpro Dbase tables and collects the needed data in a query. This data should be exported to Excel. "Theoretically" everything is working, but I have several problems:

1. query fields are padded with lots of leading spaces, this seems to be a FoxPro issue (I found this: http://www.ml-consult.co.uk/foxst-36.htm , don't know how to work with it)
2. trimming through sql-commands does not work (whitespace is created by foxpro query, the tables are "clean")
3. tried to get things done in Delphi with the help of "onGetText" Method of field names - that helps, but within the dataset the spaces are untouched (only their field values in the grid are correct) - also no help because exporting to delphi uses the query
4. so I have to get rid of the whitespaces from Delphi to Excel. I use this: Exporting data from a DBGrid to Excel and thought I could execute Excel's trim-funtion to manipulate the fields. So my question is: how can I execute vba-code? I found this: Trim Cells using VBA in Excel

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

PS: I also looked for a simple "replace all spaces but not within words" way, thought of regexp, but found no way to get this done from within my Delphi code.

As there is not very much text in the excel sheet (100 lines, 4 columns), I could walk through every single cell... but that seems to be not very elegant. How does Trim work in Excel VBA? How to trim text in a column with VBA - Excel

So there's the code for simple replacement of all spaces - unfortunately it also replaces necesserary space between 2 words in a cell:

 ovExcelApp := CreateOleObject('Excel.Application');
   try
   ovExcelApp.displayAlerts := false;
   ovExcelWorkbook := ovExcelApp.WorkBooks.Add;
   ovWS := ovExcelWorkbook.Worksheets.Item[1]; 
   ovWS.Activate;
   ovWS.Select;
   ovWS.Cells.NumberFormat := AnsiChar('@');
   ovRange := ovWS.Range['A1', 'A1']; //go to first cell
   ovRange.Resize[Data.RecordCount, Data.Fields.Count];
   ovRange.CopyFromRecordset(Data, Data.RecordCount, Data.Fields.Count); 
   ovExcelApp.Cells.Replace(
       What := ' ',
       Replacement := '', 
       LookAt := 2, 
       SearchOrder := 1, 
       MatchCase := False,
       SearchFormat := False,
       ReplaceFormat := False
       );
   end;
   // How could I do a regexp (only replace leading spaces) or do a trim over all cells withing ovWS?
   ovRange.EntireColumn.AutoFit;
   ovWS.SaveAs(DestName, 1, '', '', False, False);

Trying to trim field values brings an error:

procedure Tf_dbftools.qADO_einzelnAfterOpen(DataSet: TDataSet);
begin
  with qADO_einzeln do begin
    first;
    while not eof do begin
      edit;
      Fields[0].AsString := trim(fields[0].asstring);
      Fields[1].AsString := trim(fields[1].asstring);
      Fields[2].AsString := trim(fields[2].asstring);
      Fields[3].AsString := trim(fields[3].asstring);
      next;
    end;
    //post -> error
  end;
end;

I just need to edit the data (from different tables) in the qADO Query resp. dataset to get things correctly exported to Excel. Do I really need to copy the data into a clientDataset to edit them?

Answer 1

Finally I chose this (simple...) solution by copying every cell value manually so I can use Delphi's trim function:

.. some code as above, but now "data" is a TADOQuery:

 data.First;
    for RowIndex := 0 to Data.RecordCount - 1 do begin
      for ColumnIndex := 0 to data.Fields.Count - 1 do begin
        ovWS.Cells[RowIndex+1, ColumnIndex+1].Value := trim(data.Fields[columnIndex].AsString);

        next ;
      end;
    data.Next;
    next;

(... but still wondering if there is a simpler and "cleaner" way... besides the fact that padding in Foxpro is horrible!)