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Hey can someone explain this VB (Visual basic) code in a way thats simple for everyone to understand even minimal to no coding experience but still explains each section, also what dim and open do. Thanks!
Dim studentname As String
Dim intMsg As String
Private Sub Command1_Click()
‘To read the file
Text1.Text = ""
Dim variable1 As String
On Error GoTo file_error
Open "D:\Liew Folder\sample.txt" For Input As #1
Do
Input #1, variable1
Text1.Text = Text1.Text & variable1 & vbCrLf
Loop While Not EOF(1) Close #1

Answer 1

Declare a student name variable that we will call studentname as a string. Think of variables as you would do x and y in an algebraic equation. They are simply names for things of a particular type. In a maths equation x and y are numbers. A string is a basically a sequence of characters, such as words, numbers, or any other arbitrary data. "Moo-Juice" is a string, for example - delimited by the " characters.
Declare a message called intMsg as a string.
Subroutine "Command1_Click", called when the button (presumably) Command1 is clicked by the user. Subroutines are functions and are where you either put common code that you wish to re-use, or in the case of languages such as this, to respond to events that have occurred. Events in GUI applications come in various different flavours, this one is called when the user clicks a button. Others include MouseMove, KeyUp, KeyDown. Responding to these events allows your code to do stuff.
Set the Text1 control's Text property to an empty string (clear it). Controls on a form (both the text box and the button are examples of controls), have properties. The Text property is where a Textbox control stores what you can see in the textbox. Controls generally have a whole bunch of properties. Left denotes where it is on the form with regards to the horizontal position. Font specifies want font to use, etc, etc. There are many different GUI systems, and beyond VB6 and in the .NET environment there are Windows Forms, and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). In other languages there are as many GUI systems as you can care to think of.
Declare variable1 as a string.
Within this subroutine (Command1_Click), should an error occur go to the file_error label that appears not to be in your code snippet so we can assume it is farther down, beyond the loop. GoTo does exactly what it says on the tin - it jumps to the label specified and execution continues there. On Error tells visual basic what to do if an error occurs, and in this case it is saying "Go there if something goes awry".
Open the file specified, in read mode, assigning it file handle #1 for future reference. File handlers, like variables, are a way of identifying a file we want to do something with. Without file handlers (in VB6) if I open multiple files at the same time, how does the system know which one I want to write to? By saying "Open this file, and I'll refer to it as #1", we can tell the system which file we want to play with at any particular point in time.
Begin a loop. There are many loop constructs, and the verbosity of VB6 (and BASIC in general) allows you to see what kind of loop you're doing. This is a Do loop. It will execute at least once, with the condition at the end being checked each iteration. Should that check return true, the loop stops. Other loop types include For (for fine-grained control over steps, and how many iteration. Other languages allow more expressive boolean logic to determine the exact lifetime of a for-loop), and While which is similar to do, but the check is performed at the top, so it may run zero times if the condition fails immediately.
Read in a line from file handle #1 in to our string variable variable1. Remember we've told it which file handle to use and so the system knows where to read the data from.
Append this to the text box we emptied earlier, with a carriage-return & line-feed. Given that we are reading line-by-line, we're preserving the line-endings when putting the text in to the text box. Appending means we're keeping what was there and adding to it.
Keep doing this until we've reached the end of the file. The EOF() function takes a file handle and says whether we've reach the *E*nd *O*f the *F*ile. Remember that the end of our loop terminates if the expression is true. Well, EOF() returns true if we've reached the end of the file. A good time to stop reading it, don't you think? :)
Close the file handle. Enough said! :)
To Summarise
This code snippet reads in a file line-by-line and puts the contents in a textbox, preserving the line-endings.
Issues
intMsg is never used.
Neither is studentname
As mentioned earlier, you're missing the file_error label and the end of the sub-routine (End Sub).