SWPREAD  	    VERS. 1 IN KAYPRO II S-BASIC	  MAY 6, 1984

	 TO READ AND SAVE TEXT FROM PERFECT WRITER SWAP FILE

	     Inspired by Edmund Bolles (KUGRAM 2:2, 1984)

Have you ever lost a text file you were editing due to failure to get
it saved?  Most users of word processors can recall one or more such
disasters.  A power failure, disk drive failure, disk full or bad
sector, keyboard dead due to static shock--these and other causes can
prevent saving your work.  With most text editors the file was forever
lost, but with Perfect Writer virtually all of it is in the swap file
(PW.SWP) on the edit disk.  The problem was getting it out--until now.

Edmund Bolles showed how to easily read PW.SWP and save it in a new
file (SWAP.MSS) which can be edited.  The text available in PW.SWP may
be not quite complete and require considerable editing, but it is far
better than nothing.

SWPREAD includes several enhancements of the Bolles program, mainly:

1. Execution halts to give self-documentation and to permit changing
disks.  This allows the program to be kept on a separate disk and
never moved.

2. Better rejection of unwanted characters (ASCII over 159) which are
very troublesome when numerous (cursor movement may be extremely slow
and unpredictable).  Some unwanted characters may remain.

3. Does not reject TABs (ASCII 9).

4. Adds EOF (end-of-file, ASCII 26) to SWAP.MSS, needed to prevent an
error message and possible failure when it is read by Perfect Writer.

5. Eliminates brief repetitions which usually occur about every 1000
bytes in PW.SWP.  These repetitions are generally 16-24 characters
long.  They are preceded by ^M (ASCII 13) and are followed by one or
two ^M.  SWPREAD discards any characters between two ^M within 30
characters of each other.  It also discards the ^M, along with many
other "garbage" characters.

6. Runs twice as fast.  

				NOTES

SWPREAD is set to read only 62k of PW.SWP.  This is to prevent
accidentally trying to read beyond the end of the usual 64k PW.SWP.  
If your PW.SWP is smaller than 64k, use caution, because reading
beyond its end will cause you to have to start over.

If your PW.SWP is larger than 64k and you wish to read more than 62k
of it, increase the 62 on line 32 of SWPREAD.BAS and re-compile it.

Do not be concerned that SWPREAD displays your text to the screen in a
form that looks very different from what you wrote.  Carriage returns,
TABs, and paragraphs will reappear when you edit SWAP.MSS.

SWPREAD.BAS contains several remarks intended to aid its readability. 
Unexpectedly, a few of these had to be located somewhat illogically in
order for the program to compile.

Don Davis, 5603 Bull Creek Rd., Austin, TX 78756