WHAT IS THIS AT THE END OF MY TEXT FILE? 1

[faxpay]

I have a text file with about 40 lines and at the end of the file, on a line all by itself at the very left, is a small box with the letters "SUB" inside it. I copied it below and it shows up as a small square.

Can anyone tell me what this is????


820000002603576693510000000000000000040892221204696825 121108250000001
9000001000003000000260357669351000000000000000004089222


Just a little square.

faxpay,
Tom

 

[dilettante]

The ASCII SUB character is &H1A, 26 in decimal, also known as Ctrl-Z or ^Z.

This was the old DOS "end of file" text file marker, inherited from CP/M (which had no EOF byte count in its file header blocks). Many programs will still place a ^Z at the end of a text file on output.

Why do text files end in Ctrl+Z?

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    Dim f As Integer
    
    f = FreeFile(0)
    Open "data.txt" For Output As #f
    Print #f, "Line 1"
    Print #f, "Line 2"
    Print #f, Chr$(26);
    Close #f
    
    MsgBox "Created"
End Sub

Private Sub Command2_Click()
    Dim f As Integer, l As String
    
    f = FreeFile(0)
    Open "data.txt" For Input As #f
    Do Until EOF(f)
        Line Input #f, l
    Loop
    Close #f
    
    MsgBox "Last line: " & l
End Sub

After clicking Command1, then Command2, the second MsgBox will show "Last line: Line 2" which shows that the ^Z is handled without incident or error when using VB6 native I/O to read the file in text mode.

 

[faxpay]

diletante,

That is exactly where this file was generated in an old DOS program. Thank You. Now I know this is not a necessary character for my upload to an entity.

Sometimes I wonder how you people find answers to these things.

Thanks Again.

faxpay,
Tom

 

[faxpay]

diletante,

By the way. What is that (MIS) after your name? Is that Microsoft Information Services? and if so are you with Microsoft?

Excuse my ignorance.

faxpay,
Tom

 

[dilettante]

No, just means "Management Information Systems" and it is probably a lousy classification these days.

Nobody here but us chickens.