Word VBA- Delete lines in pattern

[Hamae]

I don't know anything about VBA. I have a file with 3 million lines of data (it's actually a txt file).

Is there a way to delete lines in a certain pattern e.g. in every 5 lines, keep the 1st line and delete the remaining 4.

Thank you very much!!

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

Easiest way would be to suck the data into Excel.

Number each Row using the cell drag feature (can number thousands of lines in a few seconds)

Assuming that your data is in COLUMN A, your row numbers are in COLUMN B, in COLUMN C

=MOD(B1,5)

and copy down thru your data

Now this column has 0 - 4, Decide which number(s) you want to delete.

sort on COLUMN C and delete the appropriate rows.

Save the data as text or copy the data in COLUMN A and paste special - text into Word.

VOLA!


Skip,

http://www.TheOfficeExperts.com

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884

 

[Hamae]

Thanks for your advice. I know doing in excel will be easy. But as I said, the file contains 3 million lines and I don't think excel can support such a large number of lines.

Any idea to do it in Word (or wordpard, notepad)?

 

[jfhewitt]

You might want to create a macro to loop a certain number of times. For example, this macro will delete the first line, go down five lines and delete the next, etc for 200 runs.

For i = 1 To 100

Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
Selection.Delete Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=5
Next i
Just create the macro you want and put it between the loop statement. Make sure you don't have blank lines, etc.

 

[jfhewitt]

Ooops. 100 runs.