TextTool: Access 97 DB For Working With Text Files
Version Compatibility: Visual Basic 6
This db started out as a way to get a small "piece" of one of these text files to play with without going through Word. You can set "To Line No:" to say 300, and get the first 300 lines of the text file ("Get Text Lines"). This get routine uses "Input#" so each line is stripped of the ending CRLF. But if you have a file with no CR's, getting one line will attempt to get the whole file in one record!
So I added a "Get Bytes" routine that determines it has reached the end of a line when it encounters a LF. This routine uses the Get method so it turned out it was a whole lot faster getting a "piece" of the text file out of the middle or at the end (seems counter-intuitive when dealing with bytes instead of lines).
For example, if I have a text file that is say 11,525,535 bytes, to get the last 535 bytes, I set "From Byte No." to 11,525,000, the routine goes "straight to" byte 11,525,000 and starts processing.
Sometimes it is not obvious what chars I'm working with, so I turned it into a quasi-hex reader. This allows you to click anywhere in a line and see what the ASC value is. Or you can use the arrow buttons to move through the text line.
The save routine saves byte-for-byte what's in the textlines to another text file. One problem was when had used "Get Text Lines" so needed to add CRLF back to end of each line. So I created an "Adjust" routine that verifies that each text line ends in a CRLF. Along the way it also weeds out any chars not supported in Windows and the BackSpace char.
In order to simplify the hex-reader routines, I made the text line text box uneditable. That meant I could not do a quick paste of some text from the clipboard. So I added another routine to import the text on the clipboard.
This has turned into a decent tool that I have found myself using alot and thought it might be worth sharing.
Instructions: Click the link below to download the code. Select 'Save' from the IE popup dialog. Once downloaded, open the .zip file from your local drive using WinZip or a comparable program to view the contents.
Download texttool.zip