I got the error "Invalid Characters in Path." My path is being output to a .txt file using the $findstr command and get deleted in the process of the application so I wrote a simple sub to output the string to a Textbox to see what was throwing the error.
Private Sub Button3_Click(sender As System.Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button3.Click
Dim Folder = Application.StartupPath & "\PRODUCTION"
Dim MyFile As String = File.ReadAllText(Folder & "\results3.txt")
MyFile.Replace("/n", "") ' One of my various attempts
TextBox2.Text = Folder & "\" & MyFile & "<--END"
End Sub
An example of what is showing up:
C:/user/.../file.asasm
<--END
For some reason the findstr command is adding a second blank line after my path and I have so far been unable to remove it. At the advice of several other threads on here I have tried:
MyFile.Trim() ' From MSDN is seems this only removes null spaces and not blank lines
MyFile.TrimEnd() ' Same result as trim
MyFile.Replace("/n","") ' I'm not sure if the /n parameter can be used in this way
MyFile.Replace(10,"") ' I thought this one for sure would work since 10 corresponds to a new line in the ASCII Table
Any help resolving this would be greatly appreciated. I realize there is several other threads on this topic, but none of the solutions seem to be working here.
REVISED:
The solution I implemented in my code was
MyFile = MyFile.Replace(Envirnment.NewLine,"")
Have you tried:
MyFile.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "")
Which on Windows should be the same as:
MyFile.Replace(vbCrLf, "")
Also try:
MyFile.Replace(vbCr, "")
or
MyFile.Replace(vbLf, "")
Depending on the type of newline you have, either should work for you.
EDIT: regarding why MyFile.Replace(10,"") did not work for you. You became a victim of implicit type conversion (a feature of VB.NET), so this line was executed as:
MyFile.Replace("10","")
Please make sure you have Option Strict On, if you want to avoid such issues.
Trim will also work MyFile = MyFile.Trim(vbNewLine.ToCharArray)
Environment.NewLine is probably the best way to refer to a newline. "/n" is definitely not. For one thing, you're surely thinking of "\n", not "/n" - and for another, in vb.net even backslashes are interpreted literally (not as a control character).
Related
I'm writing numbers in a text file one number in each line like this:
N=3
My.Computer.FileSystem.WriteAllText(file_name, N & vbCrLf, True)
If I then read this line with Fortran instead of returning 3 it returns Ύ╗┐3.
And if I read it with Python it returns ο»Ώ3
This only happens at the very first of the file and nowhere else. How do I get rid of it and why it's there?
This method uses UTF-8 encoding without a Byte-Order Mark (BOM). Environment.NewLine is platform independent. Requires Imports System.IO at top of file.
Private Sub OPCode()
Dim N = 3
File.AppendAllText(file_name, N & Environment.NewLine)
End Sub
Consider using vbNewLine instead of vbCrLf.
Dim N As Integer = 3
My.Computer.Filesystem.WriteAllText(file_name, N & vbNewLine, True)
This should solve your issue. Or, that problem has a high chance of happening due to text encoding problems.
Please help. I have a piece of code that's already working in other parks of my program, however fails to work when accessed by a certain form so i can't see there can be an error with it. Its an information storage project using text files. A screenshot of the exact code and the error:
I expected it to change the label text to the contents of the text file its trying to read.
Thanks everyone :)
Well, there must be one or more illegal characters coming from your "zoots1.txt" file!
Build the filename and see what it looks like:
Dim zoot1s As String
zoot1s = My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText("zoot1s.txt")
Dim fileName As String
fileName = zoot1s + "c.txt"
MessageBox.Show(fileName)
Dim ClassStrain As String
ClassStrain = My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText(fileName)
TempLabel3.Text = ClassStrain
Timer1.Start()
--- EDIT --
My bad. I Found the issue to be that there is a skip in text where it goes to a new line. As if i had added vbNewline to it. Is there any way to edit the text file and take away the last character so there isnt a new line.
Use the Trim() function to get rid of white space. Also use Path.Combine() to make sure the path is correctly separated from the filename with the correct number of backslashes:
zoot1s = My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText("zoot1s.txt").Trim()
Dim fileName As String = System.IO.Path.Combine(zoot1s, "c.txt")
I think you just missed the most important thing, which is the whole specific path of your file that will be reading data from, specifically after the ReadAllText() method, so instead of this line:
zoom1s=My.computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText('zoot1s.txt")
You should edit it like this:
zoom1s=My.computer.FileSystem.ReadAllTex(My.Computer.FileSystem.CurrentDirectory & \zoot1s.txt")
I hope this can solve your problem.
^_^
I am writing a program in VB.NET which loops through a file with some file paths in it to perform an action on. The file paths in this file are each on a line, and i'm looping through the file like:
Dim FileContents As String
FileContents = System.IO.File.ReadAllText("C:\File.txt")
Dim FileSplit As String()
FileSplit = FileContents.Split(vbCrLf)
For Each ThisLine In FileSplit
Dim FileModified As Date
FileModified = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(ThisLine)
'Do something here
Next
Contents of File.txt is:
Y:\Users\localadmin\Desktop\MakeShadowCopy\FileInfo.vb
Y:\Users\localadmin\Desktop\MakeShadowCopy\FindFiles.vb
Y:\Users\localadmin\Desktop\MakeShadowCopy\MakeShadowCopy.sln
Y:\Users\localadmin\Desktop\MakeShadowCopy\MakeShadowCopy.v12.suo
The loop works fine, but it is throwing an exception on the line with GetLastWriteTime() on it, saying that the path contains illegal characters, but it is just a normal string with a file path in it.
If anyone has any ideas, or know how to escape the string going into GetLastWriteTime() that would be much appreciated :)
Thanks!
Probably the lines in your file are not correctly vbCrLf terminated.
If this is the case the Split cannot divide correctly your input in lines and you end up with the whole text passed to the GetLastWriteTime.
Instead of using ReadAllText you could use ReadAllLines and let the work to split the lines to the Framework that knows how to handle the file line break and carriage return codes.
For Each ThisLine In System.IO.File.ReadAllLines("C:\file.txt")
Dim FileModified As Date
FileModified = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(ThisLine.Trim())
Next
Also add a Trim to the ThisLine variable to remove some unseen character added erroneusly to the line
Two ideas:
Use For instead of For Each and ensure that you're getting exception on the very first iteration. If not, you may have issues with one specific file path. Check out iteration variable value if that is the case.
Open the file in a hex editor and ensure that each line is terminating properly. You might have either CR (10) or LF(13) character at the end but not both as normal in Windows.
I am using visual basic to write a Macro for Autodesk Inventor. I created a macro that calls a file dialog, see code below. Everything works fine except when a user puts a file name in with a period and a number greater than zero following it.
For example, if a user puts testfile.test in the box and hits ok. When I ask for what they put in there using .FileName, I get "testfile.test". Just like I should.
However, if the user puts testfile.1 or testfile.10 or testfile.1mdksj or anything as long as a number greater than zero directly follows the period I get back "testfile". For some reason, everything after the period and the period gets removed.
What is the reason for this? Is this a bug in visual basic or am I doing something wrong?
'Set up the file dialog
Dim oFileDlg As FileDialog
' Create a new FileDialog object.
Call ThisApplication.CreateFileDialog(oFileDlg)
'Define the filter to select part and assembly files or any file.
oFileDlg.Filter = "All Files (*.*)|*.*"
'Define the part and assembly files filter to be the default filter.
oFileDlg.FilterIndex = 1
'Set the title for the dialog.
oFileDlg.DialogTitle = "Save File As"
'Tell the dialog box to throw up and error when cancel is hit by user
oFileDlg.CancelError = True
'Show the file dialog
On Error Resume Next
oFileDlg.ShowSave
'save the user specified file
Dim newFileName As String
newFileName = oFileDlg.FileName
UPDATE:
I ended up doing the following "hack" to make things still work while dealing with a period:
oFileDlg.fileName = sFname & "."
oFileDlg.ShowSave
fullName = Left$(oFileDlg.fileName, Len(oFileDlg.fileName) - 1)
That worked fine for quite a while on Windows 7 and then Windows 10. Unfortunately, the Windows 10 Creative update seems to have changed how the file dialog works. With the above code, fullName would come back blank if there were no periods in the name and would truncate everything from the FIRST period from the left if there was a period in the name.
I'm not really sure what changed in Windows 10, but it pretty much destroyed my hack. Windows 7 still works fine and Windows 10 before the creative update works. I ended up doing the following to make everything work again in the version of Windows I mentioned above.
oFileDlg.fileName = sFname & ".00"
oFileDlg.ShowSave
fullName = Left$(oFileDlg.fileName, Len(oFileDlg.fileName) - 3)
This is a VB property, but it may extend to VBA as well. Have you tried setting the save settings to support multidotted extensions? Try something like this:
SupportMultiDottedExtensions = True
This setting is intended permit the use dotted extensions - meaning the use of periods in the file name. See this MSDN reference for documentation and information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.filedialog.supportmultidottedextensions.aspx#Y129
This SO article may also shed further light: SaveAs Dialog with a period in the filename does not return extension
EDIT
After checking the autodesk documentation - a difficult and unpleasant task, in my opinion - there does indeed appear to be no support for MultidottedExtensions. I did, however, find a function on VBAExpress that I have very closely adapted. The function can be used to filter strings with contain unacceptable characters. Jimmy Pena's blog has an excellent function for just such a purpose: http://www.jpsoftwaretech.com/excel-vba/validate-filenames/. I have only substantively added a period and a replace to the code:
'A function for filtering strings, with a focus on filenames.
Function FilterFileNameString(stringToScrub As String) As String
'Filters a filename string - or any string for that matter.
Dim FilteredString As String
'A highly nested replace function.
FilteredString = Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(Replace(stringToScrub, ".","|", ""), ">", ""), "<", ""), Chr(34), ""), "?", ""), "*", ""), ":", ""), "/", ""), "\", "")
'Returns filtered string.
FilterFileNameString = FilteredString
End Function
Jimmy Pena's blog also contains a recursive version as well, although he does not recommend it.
You can filter any strings to be used as filenames with another character - a space in this case. You could use an underscore, however, or any other character you deemed pleasant.
In general, if you are trying to use periods for versioning or a similar purpose, and inventor will not let you, I would strongly advise going to another character or set of characters that can provide such an indication, such an underscore "_", a numbering system, "001", "002", a lettering system, "AAA", "AAB", or whatever makes sense for your focus.
If you are just making the application user-friendly, I would suggest filtering the strings entered before saving them in the desired filetype, and separate the filtering of the strings from the save dialog if the period filtering gives you grief. It may add an extra step, but it may be the best and easiest way to filter out pesky invalid characters without creating unnecessary extra hassles for your users.
~JOL
Using VBA, how can I:
test whether a file exists, and if so,
delete it?
1.) Check here. Basically do this:
Function FileExists(ByVal FileToTest As String) As Boolean
FileExists = (Dir(FileToTest) <> "")
End Function
I'll leave it to you to figure out the various error handling needed but these are among the error handling things I'd be considering:
Check for an empty string being passed.
Check for a string containing characters illegal in a file name/path
2.) How To Delete a File. Look at this. Basically use the Kill command but you need to allow for the possibility of a file being read-only. Here's a function for you:
Sub DeleteFile(ByVal FileToDelete As String)
If FileExists(FileToDelete) Then 'See above
' First remove readonly attribute, if set
SetAttr FileToDelete, vbNormal
' Then delete the file
Kill FileToDelete
End If
End Sub
Again, I'll leave the error handling to you and again these are the things I'd consider:
Should this behave differently for a directory vs. a file? Should a user have to explicitly have to indicate they want to delete a directory?
Do you want the code to automatically reset the read-only attribute or should the user be given some sort of indication that the read-only attribute is set?
EDIT: Marking this answer as community wiki so anyone can modify it if need be.
An alternative way to code Brettski's answer, with which I otherwise agree entirely, might be
With New FileSystemObject
If .FileExists(yourFilePath) Then
.DeleteFile yourFilepath
End If
End With
Same effect but fewer (well, none at all) variable declarations.
The FileSystemObject is a really useful tool and well worth getting friendly with. Apart from anything else, for text file writing it can actually sometimes be faster than the legacy alternative, which may surprise a few people. (In my experience at least, YMMV).
I'll probably get flamed for this, but what is the point of testing for existence if you are just going to delete it? One of my major pet peeves is an app throwing an error dialog with something like "Could not delete file, it does not exist!"
On Error Resume Next
aFile = "c:\file_to_delete.txt"
Kill aFile
On Error Goto 0
return Len(Dir$(aFile)) > 0 ' Make sure it actually got deleted.
If the file doesn't exist in the first place, mission accomplished!
The following can be used to test for the existence of a file, and then to delete it.
Dim aFile As String
aFile = "c:\file_to_delete.txt"
If Len(Dir$(aFile)) > 0 Then
Kill aFile
End If
In VB its normally Dir to find the directory of the file. If it's not blank then it exists and then use Kill to get rid of the file.
test = Dir(Filename)
If Not test = "" Then
Kill (Filename)
End If
set a reference to the Scripting.Runtime library and then use the FileSystemObject:
Dim fso as New FileSystemObject, aFile as File
if (fso.FileExists("PathToFile")) then
aFile = fso.GetFile("PathToFile")
aFile.Delete
End if
Here's a tip: are you re-using the file name, or planning to do something that requires the deletion immediately?
No?
You can get VBA to fire the command DEL "C:\TEMP\scratchpad.txt" /F from the command prompt asynchronously using VBA.Shell:
Shell "DEL " & chr(34) & strPath & chr(34) & " /F ", vbHide
Note the double-quotes (ASCII character 34) around the filename: I'm assuming that you've got a network path, or a long file name containing spaces.
If it's a big file, or it's on a slow network connection, fire-and-forget is the way to go.
Of course, you never get to see if this worked or not; but you resume your VBA immediately, and there are times when this is better than waiting for the network.
You can set a reference to the Scripting.Runtime library and then use the FileSystemObject. It has a DeleteFile method and a FileExists method.
See the MSDN article here.
A shorter version of the first solution that worked for me:
Sub DeleteFile(ByVal FileToDelete As String)
If (Dir(FileToDelete) <> "") Then
' First remove readonly attribute, if set
SetAttr FileToDelete, vbNormal
' Then delete the file
Kill FileToDelete
End If
End Sub