Reading a binary file

**Andrew-R** · 03-13-2012, 06:55 AM

Hoping that somebody can help me out here.

A client has sent me a binary data file which I need to import into Excel. It has 200 records in, each with 160 fixed length fields, and a total record length of 3,780 bytes.

I haven't messed around with binary files since my days of programming in BBC BASIC (many years ago), but there should be a way for me to define a complete record and just read them one at time, shouldn't there? A quick Google has turned up lots of examples of people reading binary files a byte at a time, which is a bit impractical for my purposes.

So, could somebody be kind enough to jog my memory on how reading a binary file is done, please?

**Firefly2012** · 03-13-2012, 07:27 AM

Hi Andrew

Perhaps this can get you started:

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**Chippy** · 03-13-2012, 08:56 AM

Something like this, but define your data type as a 3780 byte structure.

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**Andrew-R** · 03-13-2012, 08:57 AM

Thanks for the help, Firefly.

Embarrassingly enough I remembered I still had a copy of Qbasic program that I wrote in the mid-90s knocking about, and I ended up ******* off the file read methodology from that...

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I'm sure this is a horribly archaic way of doing this, but it does seem to work.

**Andrew-R** · 03-13-2012, 09:00 AM

Thanks, Chippy - just seen your response.

**snb** · 03-13-2012, 10:16 AM

or

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Reading a binary file

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