Question:
I am new to VB and must learn it by yesterday! I am working with text strings and must figure out how to pull words from a line by an ACSII character that changes. So far I am opening a text file for sequential input and testing for the required character line by line, however, how do I find the beginning and end of the word and send the “word” to output?
Answer:
Well, you can probably check for a piece of punctuation, like a space or something. The InStr function can look in a string for a particular character. If you know for sure that you don’t have punctuation and just spaces, it will be very quick.
In order to pull the actual word out of the string you can use the Mid (aka Mid$) function. For instance, let’s say you want to pull the “username” out of some text data. You know that it will say “Username:”, then a space, then the username itself, followed by another space. We’ll say that the string you’ve read in from the file is already in the variable “WorkString” The code would look something like this:
Dim temp As StringDim Name As StringDim Startpoint As Integer’this line sets the point in the line where you’re going to start pulling out the characters of the name’it looks for the colon and then adds one for the space and one more for the actual first letter of the nameStartpoint = InStr(WorkString, “:”) + 2’now we’re going into a Do/LoopDo ‘pull out the first character here. this line says “Go to the startpoint in workstring and retrieve one letter temp = Mid(WorkString, Startpoint, 1) If temp <> ” ” Then ‘This line checks to see if it’s a space (i.e. the end of the name) Name = Name & temp ‘if not, it adds it to the Name string Startpoint = Startpoint + 1 ‘and increments Startpoint by one for the next pass through the loop Else Exit Do ‘if it is a space, we exit from the do loop. End IfLoop
