Ah, I see your point, G Wassenaar: more precisely, FROM_FIELD allows you to process a previously-loaded field as if each value in it were itself the content of an external data file, parsing each such value in accordance with the format-spec. I observe, too, that the results of parsing all those 'files' are then concatenated.
It strikes me that this is particularly useful when each value in an external file is itself structured, complex data.
e.g. a database might have a column in which each value is HTML (containing a <table/> at least, but even an entire <html> document). Here, an SQL SELECT statement will load the values into a table, and LOAD ... FROM_FIELD can then be used to parse those HTML fragments and load a particular table in each of those fragments.
See attached example.
A weakness of FROM_FIELD, though, is that if the data containing the source field of the LOAD...FROM_FIELD statement contains another field (e.g. a key field) and that fields values need to be associated with the resulting data, there's no simple way to achieve this.
Angus.
