Modifying formulas to skip to a row containing specific text

You can use the Template Wizard to move past unimportant rows of the text file until it finds a row containing the text you specify.

In the Read column, a command that begins 'If (INSTR PBUFF$ is included in the formula.  If you specified in the File Import Wizard that your text file contains a header row, this same command is also included in the Header column.  By default, this command is treated only as a comment in the template, because of the single quotes around it.

The full command looks something like 'If (INSTR PBUFF$, "my pattern") = 0, (If FEOF 1, GOTO [X1], GOTO [F1])'. To activate the command, replace the text "my pattern" with the text you are looking for and remove the single quotes from the beginning and end of the expression.

Be sure to modify the command in the column where it is needed:

This modified statement causes the template to keep reading lines from the file until it finds a line containing the pattern you specify. Thus, the template will only process lines from the file containing this pattern of text. These will be the only lines that are considered to contain data or header information.

Another variation on this command is to change the “= 0” portion to “> 0” to reverse the decision (only skip lines containing certain text).