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