String Manipulation Problems

[Guest tikki]

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.

[Spike]

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.

       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.

[Guest tikki]

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 :)

[Spike]

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.

[Guest tikki]

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.

[Guest tikki]

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 :)

 

   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