Good stuff about dealing with big files, but for the delimiter it's easy enough to set LF rather than CRLF in the file's connection object. I do this for data from a well-known provider of financial information which seems unable to standardize on CRLF or LF for its various files.
Bill.
Nice article. I would have never thought to use SED on Windows for that purpose.
I'll keep it in my favorites for just in case situations.
Great article. Fortunately I have not come across this yet but always keep this type of info around just in case.
For me the biggest issue has been mainframe files where the columns are fixed width but the file truncates to the line when a particular coulmn is not there. For me it is simply to import the whole thing into a single char column then export back to a new file and run thru the import as originally design. Would be nice to have a tool to auto check this and fix the file or data (source code would be great so I could just make a DTS object) while importing. Anyone got such an animal per chance?
Hi,
Good article.
The problem is even more general then just importing from UNIX-generated files. I had recently to show one of the business ladies why the data import jobs for her application done by the third-party SW fails based on what files another company sends her. I created 5 files generated by DTS, VBScript and export from Excel using different row and field delimeters to show her the file will contan delimeters that a particular programmer specifies. Also, I showed to her that if the Comments field contains one of her row or field delimier characters her data import job will fail too with the message about incorrect number of fields.
We all have to determine what are row and field delimeters before setting up any file processing and after that to work with the file supplier to make sure they don't change their processes and technologies to produce the files. Here is a part of the script that helps me to see what characters are used. It posts a message for each character (for the demo), re-write it to output into the file.
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("C:\Temp\Files\MyTextFile.txt", 1)Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream strCharacters = objFile.Read(1) Wscript.Echo strCharacters & " " & Cstr(asc(strCharacters))Loop
