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This series of blogs is intended to provide online training in how to debug in Visual Basic for Applications, including using breakpoints and the immediate window.
- Debugging Macros
- Ways to Step Through Code in VBA
- Setting Breakpoints and the VBA Stop Statement
- Debug.Print and the Immediate Window (this blog)
- Other Useful Debugging Tools
This blog is part of our Excel VBA tutorial. You can also learn to program in Visual Basic for Applications on one of our scheduled or tailored VBA training courses.
Posted by Andy Brown on 25 November 2011
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Reading in Lines from a Text File
Sample Code to Loop Over Lines
Having created a text file (as per the previous part of this blog), here's some code to read it in. The trick is to keep reading lines until we reach the end of the text stream:
Sub ReadFile()
'again, we need this strange thing to exist so that ...
Dim fso As New FileSystemObject
'the file we're going to read from
Dim ts As TextStream
'... we can open a text file with reference to it
Set ts = fso.OpenTextFile("C:\Wise Owl\info.txt", ForReading)
'keep reading in lines till no more
Dim ThisLine As String
Dim i As Integer
i = 0
Do Until ts.AtEndOfStream
ThisLine = ts.ReadLine
i = i + 1
Debug.Print "Line " & i, ThisLine
Loop
'close down the file
ts.Close
End Sub
Here's what this would show in the immediate window:

The routine prints out the lines to the immediate window
More on the OpenTextFile Method
When you choose to open a text file, you can do it in one of 3 ways:

The 3 possible ways to open a text stream
In our example we wanted to read from the file, but you can also use the OpenTextFile method to open a file to write more lines to it (using ForAppending).
- Debugging Macros
- Ways to Step Through Code in VBA
- Setting Breakpoints and the VBA Stop Statement
- Debug.Print and the Immediate Window (this blog)
- Other Useful Debugging Tools