[VB6] Generic Delimited Text File Reader

ReadDelimited

This is a simple Function defined within the DelimitedText.bas module.

You pass it a file name of a delimited text columnar data file along with a number of other parameters and get back a 2-dimensional Variant array of data.

Features

• Only reads ANSI files where lines/rows are delimited by Cr or CrLf, since it uses Line Input # to read the lines.
• Delimiter can be comma, Tab, etc.
• First row can define the number of columns, or you can specify a "hard" number of columns. Extra columns are ignored, missing columns are left Empty. Probably best when used without type conversion, but you could enhance this function to accept an array of default values to use.
• Optionally can parse the first row as column headers.
• Optionally can convert column data types from String to an array of specified types (vbLong, vbDate, etc.).
• Conversion can be done for specific locales to handle alternate decimal point symbols and date formats.
• Quotes (") are parsed off to allow delimiter characters within values, optionally this can be overriddden to retain quotes as part of the data.

Miscelleneous

Little effort has gone into optimization. The relatively slow Split() function is used extensively here.

The module is attached here within a demo project that dumps the result into a flexgrid control for viewing, along with some sample data files.

Attached Images

 

Attached Files

• ReadDelimited.zip (5.7 KB)