importing data and deleting info

[Howard Bornstein]

>I'm importing data from external files, but I don't want the first three 
>characters of each line to be there (they are numbers to keep track of data. 
>Ex. 001 = the 1st 3 char of line 1, 002 = the 1st 3 char of line 2, etc.)

Assuming that you *always* want to delete exactly 3 characters at the 
beginning of each line, here's a simple method:

-- Read your file into a variable. In this example, "fileData".
-- To get rid of the first 3 characters of each line...

repeat for each line theline in fileData
    delete char 1 to 3 of theline
    put  theline&return after newFileData
end repeat

--variable newFileData now contains your "clean" data.

>Also, can I tell Revolution to get the specific external file and 
>automatically delete the unwanted info as it comes in, or do I have to put 
>the info into a separate variable before it will work?

While you could probably read in a record at a time an process each 
record after it is read, it's *much* faster to do it as a batch after the 
whole file is read in. The "Repeat For Each" structure is blazingly fast.

Regards,

Howard Bornstein
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