pipe delimited file

[shootsnlad]

I have a pipe delimited text file. It has numerous fields in it. The fields are different size for each line of the file, so there is no way for me to tell what is in position X, and so on. I need to load in the file into a temp table I created, so I can compare the tables later on. I have a few ideas on how to do this, and would like some opinions on them as well as which functions I should look into, depending on what idea I use.

 

1. Read the file character by character, separating the fields by knowing they are separated by the pipe '|' system, and also going from record to record, line to line.

 

2. Throw out the idea of a temp table and just do the comparison straight from the text file to the comparison table record by record. If the data from the file needed to be loaded, I would still have the separate the fields manually.

 

3. Hoping VB.NET has some kind of code where it would know about delimited files.

 

4. Import the file into Access, load the temp table from the imported table. (I would like to automate the whole process however, so I consider this a last resort)

 

Thanks for the help!

[Derek Stone]

The easiest method would consist of reading the file in line by line and calling String.Split(). You could easily produce a 2-dimensional array using this method.