String Manipulation Problems

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tikki

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Greetings,

I am working on a small program to track the debt my brother is in to me (he borrows a lot of money ;)). The data file is a basic txt file of with a format like this.

Gasoline $-20.00
Food $-5.00
Washed my car $+10.00

I am reading in the txt file using StreamReader on form load and wrote a sub procedure called GetDollarAmounts() which uses a for loop to go through each character and look for the $ sign using SubString. When it finds that dollar sign, it then reads in the appropriate sign and Substrings to the first number and does a do...while to get all numbers (via an IsNumeric function I wrote). It finally puts the dollar amount in a totalAmount var which it displays on a label at the bottom of my form.

That is a mess that doesn't work. Is there an easier way to accomplish this? Any help is appreciated.
 
It looks like each line of the text file is separted by a vbCrLf....if that is the case, you can use the substring to find the "$" sign, and then start the next substring were the dollar sign is, and then search for vbCrLf.
Code: 
        Dim a As Integer
        Dim b As Integer
        Dim s As String = "mydata $1.25" & vbCrLf
        Dim sOutput As String
        a = s.IndexOf("$")
        b = s.IndexOf(vbCrLf, a)
        sOutput = sOutput.Substring(a, b - a)
*Note, it may need some tweaking, because i didn't test it.
 
I don't quite understand how I can get this to work when my data.txt file will be so dynamic. In your example you have a hardcoded string to display one of the items in the list....

maybe i am too narrowminded, or maybe it is just too late in the evening for me :)
 
Well, that was just a small example. You should load the file into a string and loop through the string and pull out the information similar to the example.
 
yeah, i realized that this morning. Amazing what sleep deprivation does to ya ;)

I am working on it now. I'll post my results a bit later tonight hopefully.

Thanks.
 
Fixed my problems! Thanks to all. Was a learning experience since I am terrible when it comes to string manipulation. Posted my code in case anyone else ever happens to run into my problem and wants some reference :)

Code: 
    Sub GetDollarAmounts()
        Dim StreamToDisplay As StreamReader
        Dim strCurrentLine As String
        Dim intIndexOfDollar As Integer 'index of $ in each line
        Dim intIndexOfReturn As Integer 'index of vbCrLf
        Dim dblDollarAmount As Double   'total dollar amount
        Dim dblTotalDollarAmount As Double
        StreamToDisplay = File.OpenText("C:\data.txt")
        ' Do this while not at the end of the file.  
        Do While StreamToDisplay.Peek <> -1
            strCurrentLine = StreamToDisplay.ReadLine & vbCrLf
            intIndexOfDollar = strCurrentLine.IndexOf("$")
            intIndexOfReturn = strCurrentLine.IndexOf(vbCrLf, intIndexOfDollar)
            dblDollarAmount = strCurrentLine.Substring(intIndexOfDollar, intIndexOfReturn - intIndexOfDollar)
            dblTotalDollarAmount += dblDollarAmount
        Loop
        lblTotalDebt.Text = dblTotalDollarAmount
    End Sub
 
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