Padding a Text File

christofer_simants

I am new to C#, so don't laugh! :-) I have an issue that I have not been able to find a solution for and have searched and read for 3 weeks. Here is my dilema: I have a text file that contains 400,000 rows. Each row begins with a 3 character text identifier. (I can email a sample file) This text identifier or (Record Type) can be one of 11 different values and starts every row. The rest of the row contains additional data that is supposed to be in Fixed Length. I've created a SQL Server DTS package to import from this file and break it down into 11 different tables based on Record Type (I used a simple Active X script to filter the data). Also the file second column (positions 3 - 13) is a unique Identifier and ties all Record Types together that should be connected, such as additional address info and such. The rows in the file aren't all the same length. So when you check the tables after import they are missing rows. If you were to compare the file to the table, looking at the unique identifier, then you would see that the text file starts at 2 and the table starts at 31 and skips throughout. So I figured a program in C# would be able to take the text file and pad the shorter rows, which will fix my problem. However, I can't figure it out! Any help would be very appreciated! I hope this wasn't too long and boring, but I didn't know what would be needed for a good understanding of the issue. P.S the file layout would be different for the 11 Record Types.

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chrishornberger23y ago
Here's how I generally handle this. I recently deployed a file translation framework to "black box" a bunch of file transmissions and translations inbound and outbound. First, create a class that knows how to open the input file and read enough of each row to determine the record type. Then "dispatch" those lines (records) to classes that know how to deal with and format just those record types. Then each of those classes could expose a ".FormattedData" property or even override "ToString()" to provide the properly formatted record. Try NOT to monolith this app. Light and small classes are your friend here. You'll end up with more classes, but with each one being small, light and tight, you will have one seriously maintainable codebase that is also easily extensible in the future.
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christofer_simants23y ago
I really appreciate the input, this I can make work! One other question though, since each row may vary as far as the column widths go, is there a function that will call the correct column format based on the text in the RecordType. For example: Row 1: reads BBA000002Guzman (The BBA is the Record Type) Row 2: reads CCC00000210022003 AddressLine (the CCC is the Record Type, however the column widths are different) I could create several different executables to run against the file, but it would be much easier if I could do it all at once.
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chrishornberger23y ago
This is a very classic file translation issue. You have to do it longhand or use string formatting per column data variable in your app. There are numerous ways to do this. One way might be create an array containing the number of spaces you need per field: int RecFields[] = { 3, 10, 31, 14, 5, 6 }; Then you can use that number (field number is your index) as a quantifier for your padding. Say you want right justified space on your fields: assume: int fldIndex = 1; string output = new string( ' ', RecFields[fldIndex] ) + myFieldvalue; output = output.Substring( 0, RecFields[fldIndex] ); this says: output = 10 spaces (from index 1 of the RefFields array) and my data, then take the first 10 spaces of my data which should be x number of data bytes plus filler to get me to 10 fixed spaces. Doing it this way ensures that even empty values or null values in your data (reflected as "myFieldValue" in the example) will always truncate down to the number of spaces necessary for your padding. This is but ONE way to do this. Ask 10 programmers, you'll get about 30 different ways, all being valid. Find one you like and are comfortable with.
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