Programmers please read.

[geeslaka]

If you can find something with regex find and replace, use this for the regex.
(space)*B.*
* is a wildcard that means "zero or more of the previous character"
. is a wildcard that means "any character"
That will match both of those cases.

[Proteus_MST]

Just expot it into Access,
write a small VBA Solution and then reconvert it into Text

If it is in a compatible Format to convert it (i.e. all Fields are separated, for example by Commas or by Tabs) there should be no Problem

[DrSpike]

Hold that..........I can see how 2 separate replace "(space) with " can solve the problem for the main 2 cases. I can also see now that removing all spaces with find and replace is easy (I didn't think before it woudl work).

If there is a more complex problem I'll bug Geeslaka.

Cheers all.

Doc

[geeslaka]

* waits to be bugged *
It's the monday after Labor Day so I have no school and lots of better things to do that need ignoring.

Edit: typo

[DrSpike]

Well I've finished for the day now. I'll check tomorrow and see if I need a "clever" solution. Right now I think the blunt method will work. I had no idea find and replace would recognise and remove (space) without any unwanted side-effects, which of course there would be in a normal setting - I was envisaging doing a find and replace for each separate code.

And I said "bug". There are other people around here who can help you with your other problem.

[pchang]

Dr. Spike

If you need to remove leading spaces only, then you will need to install some more software on your machine. There are a number of choices:

1) Emacs for PC
2) Perl or some other scripting language (one of us can send you an appropriate script to run)
3) Customer program (one of us can write a simple program and compile it to a windows executable and send it to you - this may require installation of a dll too).

[Mercator]

Open file in Word, select all, turn into list, turn list off again... Tadaa! All leading spaces are gone.

Or get a decent program that can do regular expressions.

Edit: major crosspost, and I didn't see there was a quotation mark before it... oh well

[DanS]

Spike: What you are looking for is just one line of code. I would ship it off to geeslaka, because of what pchang mentions. It shouldn't take him but 5 minutes to do.

[DrSpike]

As I said thanks all, but I think I can use MtG's suggestion. If I need something more clever I will ask one of the people who have kindly offered to help out.

[Urban Ranger]

In order of preference:

1. Perl, awk or any similar tools that support regex
2. BASIC (nice built-in string handling capabilities)
3. Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Klylix (very handy, not quick-and-dirty for this situation, though)

[Urban Ranger]

If you are interested, you can investigate Cywin for future uses