How To Read A Document Row By Row, The TX Newsletter Archive

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Please note that the TX Text Control newsletter DOES NOT and WILL NEVER contain any malicious code. The problem lies in the ill-configured security measures in place at the gateway of many companies.

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How To Read A Document Row By Row

In some cases it might be useful if you can read a document row by row and not in one big gulp. This source code snippet show you exactly how to do this.

The example uses 2 separate TX Text Controls. The first one shows a normal page layout of a document and the other one shows, upon a button click, the unformatted rows of the first TX Text Control with their line numbers.

The sample is straightforward. However, the only part that has to be explained a little is what happens when the buttons are pressed.

Private Sub Command1_Click()

    Dim index, line As Long

    line = 1

    ' Clear 2nd TX
    TXTextControl2.ResetContents

    ' User shall not see what we do
    TXTextControl1.LockWindowUpdate = True

    ' Find index of 2nd line
    TXTextControl1.SelStart = 0
    index = SendMessage(TXTextControl1.hwnd, TX_LINEINDEX, 0, line)

    While (index <> 0)

        ' Select the line and append it to the pother TX
        TXTextControl1.SelLength = index - TXTextControl1.SelStart
        TXTextControl2.SelText = CStr(line) + ": " + TXTextControl1.SelText + vbCrLf

        TXTextControl1.SelStart = index

        ' Now increment line and get index of next line
        line = line + 1
        index = SendMessage(TXTextControl1.hwnd, TX_LINEINDEX, 0, line)
    Wend

    ' Now use a really large value for SelLength to select the
    ' entire last row
    TXTextControl1.SelLength = 1000
    TXTextControl2.SelText = CStr(line) + ": " + TXTextControl1.SelText

    ' Clean up
    TXTextControl1.SelStart = 0
    TXTextControl1.SelLength = 0
    TXTextControl1.LockWindowUpdate = False
    TXTextControl1.SetFocus

End Sub

This is what happens: The second control is cleared and LockWindowUpdate is used once again to prevent the user from seeing that we are selecting text.

Then the TX_LINEINDEX message is used to retrieve the input position of the first character in the second row.

Once we know this position, we can select the entire first row, which goes from 0 to index.

The selected text is appended to the second TX Text Control and we continue to do the same procedure for the next line and so on.

So we leave the loop and finish by selecting the entire last line and appending it as well.

For those of you who are not familiar with the SendMessage API, the TX_LINEINDEX message will be also accessible via a property in the next version of TX Text Control.

The Newsletter Archive

As a loyal reader of this newsletter, you will no doubt treasure the valuable content that you receive every week, directly in your Inbox.

On the new web site, we have spent considerable time structuring the past editions so that you can quickly locate the information that you are looking for.

Just below the sub-heading 'Past editions' you will see a rather long table with the name of the newsletter and date of publication. By clicking on the newsletter title, you can link to the archived edition. Using this method, you can get a really good overview of the newsletters that we have published.

However, to extract the really interesting information from the newsletter archive, you should use the powerful full text search engine. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the search box is at the top right of every page. As you are in the newsletter archive section, the scope-selection combo box has already been set to 'newsletter'. So, simply enter a search term and hit the button labeled 'GO'. Within a second you will be returned with a list of matching pages. Clicking on the title of the returned results will take you to the archived newsletter edition.

As we have been urging you for the last few weeks, so that we can continue to improve on your experience of our web site, please comment on the new layout.

Thank you! Next week, we will continue with part four of our six part series and discuss how to get the most out of the links section of the new TX Text Control web site.

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