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kjohnsonm
Lapis Lazuli | Level 10

I am searching my file system mining for metadata, am looking at all old txt files in this iteration.  Thus I am in this case trying to read txt files with per file an unknown delimiter, and unknown length.  Is there a preferred method (function) to go about this?  I was thinking a whole line at a time, but am open to ideas. -Keith

(I have already done the work for many other file extensions with easily extractable metadata)

2 REPLIES 2
Reeza
Super User
Proc Import and then use the code created. Let the computer take the first guess.
PGStats
Opal | Level 21

I would define a small set of possible delimiters and do a character count for each candidate delimiter within the first, say, 20 lines of the file. If none of the delimiters appears, I would assume that the file is delimited by spaces.

 

Another more subtle approach would use the fact that delimiters should occur at the same frequency on every line.

PG

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