Question

What I have:

So there is this large project I’m working on for school, and I have everything working except for a small but vital piece. The programm I am working on must convert currency, and take the rates from a txt file. The file looks like this:

USD 1,2694
JPY 100,44
BGN 1,955
CZK 25,396
DKK 7,45792
...

There is a tab break between the name and the value and a line break between the value and the next currency name. Values have a floating point, and don’t have a fixed length.

What I need:

I need to break this string into two arrays, currencyNames() and currencyValues(), or into a two-dimentional array currency().

What I can do myself:

I can load it from a file into a string with

fileReader = My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText("rates.txt")

And I was able to break it into an array with a simple loop

Do While i < 32
    dummyArray = Split(fileReader, " ")
    i += 1
Loop

but only when there is a space separating the names and values inside the file.

Answer 1

What you’re looking for are the VB Constants, a set of special strings for special characters like tab and new line – there’s a list at the link, but yours in particular are vbTab and vbCrLf. You shouldn’t need to import anything – they’re built in to VB.

To use them, you’d change it to something like:

dummyArray = Split(fileReader, vbCrLf) ' to split on lines

And then:

For Each s as String In dummyArray
  otherArray = Split(s, vbTab) ' to split on tab characters