Question

I am working on a script that converts a .txt file (non delimited) to an Excel spreadsheet. My problem occurs where I need to pull data that could be between 5-10 characters and there are several sets of data on each line.

Each line can have the following number of characters in each field and there are five fields to pull in each line:

10 char    10 char   10 char  17 char           10 char

523452    D918      20120418  1FD7X2XTACEB8963820120606  
523874    L9117244  20120409  3C6TDT5H0CG12130200000000
535581    G700      20120507  5GYFUD CT        00000000

I basically need to be able to pull 10,10,10,17,10 and place them in their own cell in a row in Excel. I am able to pull the cells as it is now but its based on space delimitation and that causes a problem when the fields don’t take up the full amount of space and I end up with an Excel sheet with blank cells in it.

Answer 1

You can use String.Substring (your tag reads C#):

using System;
using System.IO;

class Test 
{
  public static void Main() 
  {
     try 
     {
        // Create an instance of StreamReader to read from a file.
        // The using statement also closes the StreamReader.
        using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader("TestFile.txt")) 
        {
            String line;
            // Read and display lines from the file until the end of 
            // the file is reached.
            while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null) 
            {
                String Chunk1 = line.Substring( 0, 10);  // First 10
                String Chunk2 = line.Substring(10, 10);  // Second 10
                String Chunk3 = line.Substring(20, 10);  // Third 10
                String Chunk4 = line.Substring(30, 17);  // Now 17
                String Chunk5 = line.Substring(47);      // Remainder (correction: Chunk2 --> Chunk5)
                Console.WriteLine("Chunks 1: {0} 2: {1} 3: {2} 4: {3} 5: {4})",
                     Chunk1, Chunk2, Chunk3, Chunk4, Chunk5);

            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
     }
     catch (Exception e) 
     {
        // Let the user know what went wrong.
        Console.WriteLine("The file could not be read:");
        Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
     }
  }
}