( Line Input ) Run time error '14' - Out Of String

[chrisgreaves]

I was amazed to see, this morning, that Line Input fails when trying to read the first line of a large (36MB) comma-delimited text file.

There are more than 65K lines in the file, so a cheap Import into Excel fails. Access barfs on the first line (but I really think it's a different problem, because Access barfed on the first line of a different file (12MB) but Excel managed to read 32K lines of it.


Why should LINE INPUT throw up its hands? I thought it might read a buffer of, perhaps, 64K and then parse the lines out of that.

In the code sample below I have disabled the offending lines. The new lines (for Binary Read) work, returning a gob of text each time, which, presumably, I must break into lines, and then parse.

A pox on Line Input!


<pre>Sub test()
Dim intFile As Integer
intFile = FreeFile

Dim strFilename As String
strFilename = "C:GreavesProductsGeographyNAmericaUSACaliforniaCA _deci.txt"

' Open strFilename For Input As #intFile
Open strFilename For Binary As #intFile

While Not EOF(intFile)

Dim strLine As String
' Line Input #intFile, strLine
strLine = Input(1024, intFile)

Wend

Close intFile

End Sub
</pre>

[charlotte]

Have you tried declaring strLine as a specific length string so that you process the text in manageable chunks?