Conversion of user-defined types

[Fordham99]

Here is my issue in a nutshell. A customer of mine has an ascii file filled with records. Every record is 256 bytes long, so I have setup types (using the vba TYPE statement) for each type of record there is.

The problem is, I have no way of knowing which type a record is until I read it into memory from the file. The indicator is the first 5 characters of the record are a code telling me which type to use. Is there a function that performs a direct memory copy from a variable of one type to a variable of another type.

Currently I am reading the data into the most common record type and then checking the code. If the type is incorrect, I write the data out to a temporary file and read it back in again to the correct type. This is (obviously) VERY inefficient because of all the useless disc reads/writes.

I have done linux programming and used the memcpy and bcopy functions. Do such functions exist in windows anywhere?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[vbajock]

Setting up user defined types to handle ascii records seems awkward. Are you familiar with the FileSystem object?

 

[Fordham99]

I am not familiar with the filesystem object. The reason I went with user defined types is because each line in the ascii file is exactly 256 bytes long and I can read it in a binary fashion (my user-defined types are all strings of specific lengths). I was actually searching for information on a different problem and I ran across this API function:

Public Declare Sub sapiCopyMemory Lib "kernel32" _
Alias "RtlMoveMemory" _
(hpvDest As Any, _
hpvSource As Any, _
ByVal cbCopy As Long)

Which seems to be the exact function I was looking for. It seems I ended up answering my own question.

If you have an idea for a better method of reading an ascii file I am wide open to any other options.