A question our Scripting Guy has decided to reserve judgment on, at least for the time being.<\/P><\/TD><\/TR><\/TBODY><\/TABLE>\n
<\/DIV>\n
The important point is that, back in the good old days, our Scripting Guy actually served a useful purpose: he knew how to write code that could remove extraneous spaces from the beginning and the end of a string. And now, for one brief moment at least, his life once more has meaning. Here\u2019s a script that will open a text file, remove excess blank spaces from the beginning and end of each line, and then save the modified lines back to the file:<\/P>
Const ForReading = 1\nConst ForWriting = 2<\/p>\nSet objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)\nSet objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(“c:\\scripts\\test.txt”, ForReading)<\/p>\n
Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream\n strLine = objFile.ReadLine\n strLine = Trim(strLine) & vbCrLf\n strText = strText & strLine\nLoop<\/p>\n
objFile.Close<\/p>\n
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(“c:\\scripts\\test.txt”, ForWriting)\nobjFile.Write strText\nobjFile.Close\n<\/PRE>\n
This script starts out by defining a pair of constants: ForReading and ForWriting. Because of the quirks of the FileSystemObject<\/B> (the scripting object used to work with text files) we have to open the log file twice to accomplish our task: once to read from the file and once to write the modified values back to the file. These constants simply tell the script which operation – reading or writing – we want to perform. (That\u2019s one of the quirks we were talking about: you can open a file for reading or for writing, but you can\u2019t do both at the same time.)<\/P>\n
After defining the constants we create an instance of the FileSystemObject and then use the OpenTextFile<\/B> method to open the file C:\\Scripts\\Test.txt for reading. That brings us to this block of code:<\/P>Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream\n strLine = objFile.ReadLine\n strLine = Trim(strLine) & vbCrLf\n strText = strText & strLine\nLoop\n<\/PRE>\nWhat we\u2019re doing here is using the ReadLine<\/B> method to read the file line-by-line. When we first enter the Do Until loop we read the first line in the text file and store that value in a variable named strLine. That means strLine will equal this:<\/P>Ken Myer *\n<\/PRE>\nNow comes that vintage programming magic you\u2019ve been waiting for. In the next line of code we use the Trim<\/B> function to remove all the blank spaces before and after our string (we also tack on a carriage return-linefeed to make sure that this value will be written as a separate line in the text file):<\/P>strLine = Trim(strLine) & vbCrLf\n<\/PRE>\nAs you probably already guessed, the Trim function automatically removes extraneous blank spaces before and after a string. That means that strLine is now equal to this (remember, the asterisk isn\u2019t really there, we\u2019re just using it to indicate the end of the data):<\/P>
Ken Myer*\n<\/PRE>\nCool, huh? We then add the value of strLine to a variable named strText, a variable we use to keep track of all the text file lines we trim:<\/P>
strText = strText & strLine\n<\/PRE>\nAnd then we loop around and repeat the process with the next line in the text file, a cycle which continues until we\u2019ve run out of lines to read (or, in more technical terms, until the AtEndOfStream<\/B> property is true).<\/P>\n
The rest is easy. We close the file Test.txt and then immediately reopen it, this time for writing. With the file open for writing we call the Write<\/B> method to write the value of strText to the file, close the file and, not coincidentally, call it a day. If you open the file Test.txt now, you\u2019ll see the data has been trimmed nice and neat:<\/P>Ken Myer*\nPilar Ackerman*\nGail Erickson*\n<\/PRE>\nWe\u2019d like to see your fancy-schmancy Blackberry device or cappuccino machine do that<\/I>!<\/P>\n
Incidentally, there are two related functions you might find useful. LTrim<\/B> trims excess spaces only from the beginning<\/I> (the left side) of a string. In other words, you end up with data like this:<\/P>Ken Myer *\nPilar Ackerman *\nGail Erickson *\n<\/PRE>\nConversely, RTrim<\/B> trims excess black spaces from only the end (right side) of a string:<\/P>Ken Myer*\n Pilar Ackerman*\n Gail Erickson*\n<\/PRE>\nThere you have it, KS. And remember, if you ever have a question about something no modern human being is likely to know how to do (like, say, change the channel without using the remote), well, now you know where to go for help.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! We have a custom in-house application that writes data to a log file. The problem is that the data often has a bunch of blank spaces before and after it. How can I remove all the blank spaces that come before and after my data?— KS Hey, KS. You might find this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,3,4,21,5],"class_list":["post-67403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-filesystemobject","tag-scripting-guy","tag-scripting-techniques","tag-string-manipulation","tag-vbscript"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! We have a custom in-house application that writes data to a log file. The problem is that the data often has a bunch of blank spaces before and after it. How can I remove all the blank spaces that come before and after my data?— KS Hey, KS. You might find this […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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