Greetings,

I am new to C# and have not programmed since my ALGOL days.

I have been doing a lot of reading, but can not figure out and efficient way to directly import a fixed width text file with 8 fields only separated by their position in the string. Each line in the text file is 420 characters long.

Some of the fields have extraneous \n's in the field so I would like to read them into a MSDE SQL database, separated into separate character fields and work on cleaning up the line feed characters after extracting them from the SQL database.

Thanks for your help,

Mike

You could use regular expressions to parse each line.

A pattern like "(.{8})(.{12})" would capture the first 8 characters, then the next 12. Do this for the entire line. Make sure to set the MultiLine option so that "." matches those line breaks as well.



/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Sam,

Thanks so much for your reply.

I am trying to decipher regular expressions and how to use them. Do you have any code snippets that show how to implement what you suggest?

Also, what is the best way to import a 420 character line from the text file. I was originally importing the file as one long string using the \b\n to copy the each text line into a table and using string functions to parse the code.

Unfortunately the data entry people are inserting extra \n characters into the file and the parsing doesn't work.

I am now trying to figure a way to take 420 characters at a time and load them into the table.

Thanks,

Mike

Well the StreamReader contains a method called ReadBlock, which can be used to read 420 characters. Or you could just use it to read each n characters.

string col1 = streamReader.ReadBlock(8);
string col2 = streamReader.ReadBlock(12);
...

if( streamReader.Peek() == -1 ) // no more lines.

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/