String Manipulation Problems

[tikki]

Greetings,

I am working on a small program to track the debt my brother is in to me (he borrows a lot of money ). The data file is a basic txt file of with a format like this.

Gasoline $-20.00
Food $-5.00
Washed my car $+10.00

I am reading in the txt file using StreamReader on form load and wrote a sub procedure called GetDollarAmounts() which uses a for loop to go through each character and look for the $ sign using SubString. When it finds that dollar sign, it then reads in the appropriate sign and Substrings to the first number and does a do...while to get all numbers (via an IsNumeric function I wrote). It finally puts the dollar amount in a totalAmount var which it displays on a label at the bottom of my form.

That is a mess that doesnt work. Is there an easier way to accomplish this? Any help is appreciated.

 

[Spike]

It looks like each line of the text file is separted by a vbCrLf....if that is the case, you can use the substring to find the "$" sign, and then start the next substring were the dollar sign is, and then search for vbCrLf.

        Dim a As Integer
        Dim b As Integer
        Dim s As String = "mydata $1.25" & vbCrLf
        Dim sOutput As String
        a = s.IndexOf("$")
        b = s.IndexOf(vbCrLf, a)
        sOutput = sOutput.Substring(a, b - a)

*Note, it may need some tweaking, because i didnt test it.

 

[tikki]

I dont quite understand how I can get this to work when my data.txt file will be so dynamic. In your example you have a hardcoded string to display one of the items in the list....

maybe i am too narrowminded, or maybe it is just too late in the evening for me

 

[Spike]

Well, that was just a small example. You should load the file into a string and loop through the string and pull out the information similar to the example.

 

[tikki]

yeah, i realized that this morning. Amazing what sleep deprivation does to ya

I am working on it now. Ill post my results a bit later tonight hopefully.

Thanks.

 

[tikki]

Fixed my problems! Thanks to all. Was a learning experience since I am terrible when it comes to string manipulation. Posted my code in case anyone else ever happens to run into my problem and wants some reference

    Sub GetDollarAmounts()
        Dim StreamToDisplay As StreamReader
        Dim strCurrentLine As String
        Dim intIndexOfDollar As Integer index of $ in each line
        Dim intIndexOfReturn As Integer index of vbCrLf
        Dim dblDollarAmount As Double   total dollar amount
        Dim dblTotalDollarAmount As Double
        StreamToDisplay = File.OpenText("C:\data.txt")
         Do this while not at the end of the file.  
        Do While StreamToDisplay.Peek <> -1
            strCurrentLine = StreamToDisplay.ReadLine & vbCrLf
            intIndexOfDollar = strCurrentLine.IndexOf("$")
            intIndexOfReturn = strCurrentLine.IndexOf(vbCrLf, intIndexOfDollar)
            dblDollarAmount = strCurrentLine.Substring(intIndexOfDollar, intIndexOfReturn - intIndexOfDollar)
            dblTotalDollarAmount += dblDollarAmount
        Loop
        lblTotalDebt.Text = dblTotalDollarAmount
    End Sub