[magusbuckley]

Hello:

I'm in the IT department for a casino. For those of you not in the gaming industry, there is a group of people called The Count Team who collect the money from the slot machines in the middle of the night. They feed the money into a money sorter and send a file, containing information about the money and which machines it all came from, to a PC. From there, the file is uploaded to an AS/400 machine.

For some reason, when the file comes across from the money counter, the text file containing all the data will at times put a minus sign in front of the asset numbers of some of the slot machines. When they try to upload those files, the AS/400 program that we use doesn't know what to do with it. In short, it creates a huge mess.

Is there a way I can create a batch file that will remove all of the minus signs from the text document before they upload?

Thanks,

Magus

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All you want it to do is remove every minus sign from the entire document?

Use a real scripting language like Python or Perl or PHP.
In PHP for example:

$data = file_get_contents("yourfile.txt");
$data = str_replace("-", "", $data);
file_put_contents("yourfile.txt", $data);

or if you are in a unix-like environment (or you have sensible unix tools installed in Windows), you can do this from the command-line with 'sed' (Stream EDitor):

sed -e "s/-//g" yourfile.txt >> your_replaced_file.txt

and this line of code could obviously be tossed in a batch file. You just need sed installed.


EDIT: you sure the minus signs don't mean anything? You sure you want to discard that information? Maybe they mean that particular slot machine is net negative on the night. As in, it has lost more money than it has taken in.

Edited by Swandog46, 03 December 2007 - 04:56 AM.

[Swandog46]

All you want it to do is remove every minus sign from the entire document?

Use a real scripting language like Python or Perl or PHP.
In PHP for example:

$data = file_get_contents("yourfile.txt");
$data = str_replace("-", "", $data);
file_put_contents("yourfile.txt", $data);

or if you are in a unix-like environment (or you have sensible unix tools installed in Windows), you can do this from the command-line with 'sed' (Stream EDitor):

sed -e "s/-//g" yourfile.txt >> your_replaced_file.txt

and this line of code could obviously be tossed in a batch file. You just need sed installed.


EDIT: you sure the minus signs don't mean anything? You sure you want to discard that information? Maybe they mean that particular slot machine is net negative on the night. As in, it has lost more money than it has taken in.

Edited by Swandog46, 03 December 2007 - 04:56 AM.

[magusbuckley]

The PHP code looks simple enough. I took Q-Basic, RPG, and COBOL in college about 10 years ago. Do I have to buy a PHP program and compile the code?

Thanks,

Magus

[Swandog46]

PHP is free (open-source). Get it here:
http://www.php.net

This is a script (interpreted code), it does not get "compiled" natively ahead of run-time, which is why you need the PHP interpreter running in order to execute a script. At run-time the interpreter parses the code, compiles it on the spot into byte code, and executes that byte code. This is why interpreted languages are ~10x slower than native compiled languages.

But I feel compelled to ask again: are you really sure these minus signs are so meaningless that you want to discard them?

Edited by Swandog46, 04 December 2007 - 06:03 AM.

[Ax238]

I wrote a little script that you could use as another option. It's not as compact as the other options, but should work great on the command line or in batch.

Usage: cscript replace.vbs file findstring [replacestring=""]

Example: cscript replace.vbs C:\Test\Text.txt "-"

The script will output a new file called "C:\Test\Edited_Text.txt".

Let me know if you have any problems with it or would like any changes made.

Ax

Attached Files

•  replace.zip   506bytes   197 downloads