I am just looking for some advice here about ASP regular expressions and if this could be done with them or any better ideas about how to handle this. We have some text files, that I will have the user upload to the server, these files are comma delimited, they need to be converted to tab delimited and we need to delete the quotes. We cannot use the replace function because of the fields would have comma within the quotes and we want to leave those alone such as this field ,"ELAN POLO, INC.", Below are a few rows of the text file, each file will contain about 107,000 lines to process.


4717836,912,1,1,201,5042,"ELAN POLO, INC.","M0225","M0225","EA R2000 CONV",54.99,29.97
13861155,912,1,1,201,5042,"ELAN POLO, INC.","M0345","M0345","EA WARNING TRACK MID",39.99,19.97
3809583,912,1,1,201,5042,"ELAN POLO, INC.","M0462","","EA SMOKE LO",29.99,24.99
3809606,912,1,1,201,5042,"ELAN POLO, INC.","M0462","","EA SMOKE LO",29.99,24.99

Thanks
Mike

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Mike
http://www.eclecticpixel.com

Hello,

Yeah, you could use Regular Expression to do this. Comma-separated files are always trickly, because quite commonly in the data you often see a comma.

Is this data coming from another source? If so, if you can change the source, what you can do is update the source to use the "^" character. Then:

replace all commas with tabs (vbTab)
replace all " with nothing
replace all ^ with ,

Something like that. I know it may be unlikely that you can do this; I thought I would just throw it out there.

Brian

Hi Mike,

If that is tough, then you can try this.

As always, there is a SPACE after COMMA in the string "ELAN POLO, INC.", you can

First replace that ", " with something like "!/@/*/~"
Then replace the other COMMA's blindly to "^" as Brian said
Then replace character you did in the 1st step back to ", "

This should help.
Cheers!

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