Single character input from a text file

[Anonymous]

Hello
I have a delimiterless text file consisting of a long (~1000 chrs) set of ASCII characters (ABCDEFGHIJK ....) and I would like to read in and process each character individually. Can anyone help me with an easy way to do this, please?
Many thanks

[Rob Hagemans]

The easiest way: if you need to read the characters in order, you could use INPUT$ to read single characters from a text file, something like:

10 OPEN "MYFILE" FOR INPUT AS 1
20 FOR I = 1 TO 1000
30   A$ = INPUT$(1,#1)
40   PRINT A$;
50 NEXT

If you're going to have to jump around in the file, you could open as a random-access file with one-byte record length, e.g.:

10 OPEN "MYFILE" FOR RANDOM AS 1 LEN=1
15 FIELD#1, 1 AS A$
20 FOR I = 1 TO 1000
30   GET#1, I
40   PRINT A$;
50 NEXT

[Anonymous]

Hello Rob. Many thanks for your speedy response. I must confess that I had wondered about your first way, but discarded it because of the documentation entry about INPUT$ :

INPUT$
chars = INPUT[ ]$ (num_chars [, [#] file_num])

Returns a string of num_chars characters from the keyboard or, if file_num is provided, from a text file.

Parameters
• num_chars is a numeric expression in [1—255].

My reason for discarding the first way was that I reasoned that when I = 1000, line 30 tries to read
num_chars (1000) into A$ , which is prohibited by the parameter definition. Have I missed something here?
Thanks for the second process.
Sincerely

[Rob Hagemans]

You're right, I made a typo in the first bit of code: num_chars should be 1, not I: Each time, one character is read. The limitation is that you can read at most 255 characters at a time, but more won't fit in a string anyway.

I've corrected the code above.