Determining the Length of a Text File

Summary: When creating a macro to process a text file, you may need to know the length of that file. You can figure this out by using the LOF function, as described in this tip. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

Several other ExcelTips have discussed opening, reading, writing, appending, and closing text files. Another VBA function associated with sequential text files is the LOF function. If used on an open file, it returns the length of the file, in bytes. In other words, you can determine the number of characters in the file. This can come in handy if you are processing a text file character by character. You can determine the length of the file and then read that many characters before you finish processing the file. The following code fragment is an example of how the LOF function is used:

Open "MyFile.Dat" for Input as #1
FileLen = LOF(1)

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2517) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Determining the Length of a Text File