Writing Text Files in WSH - Advanced writing concepts
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I’m going to quickly present two concepts that you may find very useful when working with text files in your scripts. I’m going to touch on them very briefly so please understand that these are just building blocks to help get you started.
Quite frequently you’ll be using scripts to parse data before writing to a text file. You’ll find that often this means your data will be contained in an array. The following reusable code sample shows how to write text from an array into a comma-delimited text file. You can easily change the delimiter to anything you like. Use the vbTab constant if you want to create a tab-delimited file.
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("C:\ScriptLog.txt", 2, 1)
delimiter = ","
arrDataPairs = array("Name1", "Value1", "Name2", "Value2")
For i = 0 to UBound(arrDataPairs) Step 2
Wscript.echo i
strData = arrDataPairs(i) & delimiter & arrDataPairs(i + 1)
objFile.WriteLine(strData)
Next
objFile.Close
Here we’ve just moved through the array grabbing each name-value pair and joined them with a comma before writing them together as a single line. We could easily have multiple values as well. Just remember to increase your Step value accordingly to avoid processing the same value twice. You could also use this same concept with multi-dimensional arrays.
The final concept I’d like to show you concerns the VBScript Time and Date functions. This time and date stamping is very common in file logging and can be accomplished much more quickly with these functions.
Time()
Date()
The time and Date Functions do not require any parameters and simply return a string containing the local time and date respectively. VBScript provides many different time and date functions if you’re interested in formatting them differently. Here’s a quick example.
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("C:\ScriptLog.txt", 2, 1)
objFile.Write(Time() & " " & Date() & " This is a time stamped line")
objFile.Close
This code sample will result in an output similar to the following.
8:07:39 PM 1/21/2007 This is a time stamped line
I hope I’ve provided you with some useful tools that will allow you to add greater functionality to your scripts. You’ll find that being able to read and write text files can be a very useful tool for both logging and debugging. Good luck in your adventures. Until next time, keep coding!
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