Question

I’m trying to use VB.NET to process a very large plain text file (2 GB). It is a database and has a field delimiter of SOH and a record delimiter of STX.

I want to separate the fields and records of the file.

I would normally read each line of a text file and then use the split function to separate out the fields. I can’t use this approach as there isn’t always a delimiter on every line.

Is there any way to read a file until STX is found (rather than one line at a time)?

Answer 1

There is no “Read until string ‘foo'” in .NET, you need to open a FileStream and read chunks with FileStream.Read into a temporary buffer and scan that buffer for your tokens.