I have a file that I need to reformat via either a batch file or VB Script. original sample line of text "20070301000231","501",65385,21.472,"0008" "20070510103100","523",65221,19.667,"0002" I need the new format to be "20070301 000231","501",65385,21.472,"0008" "20070510 103100","523",65221,19.667,"0002" can a non-delimited field be parsed in a batch file? thanks...ralph

Between your 2 choices of scripting languages, VB would be best. I don't work with VB, but here's a Perl commamd line regex solution that can be translated to the VB equivalent. =================================== perl -pe "s/^(\"\d{8})(\d{6}\")/$1 $2/" file.txt

I don't know VB much, here's one in Python [code] for line in open("file"): line = line.split(",") print line[0][0:9],line[0][9:]+",",','.join(line[1:]) [/code] save as script.py and from commandline, c:\> python script.py > outfile however if you also have GNU awk, [code] awk 'BEGIN{FS=","}{$1=substr($1,0,9)" "substr($1,9);$0=$0;print} ' file [/code]

Here's a batch: @echo off for /f %%i in (myfile.txt) do ( set line=%%i call :parser) goto :eof :parser set parsed1=%line:~0,9% set parsed2=%line:~9,33% echo %parsed1% %parsed2% >>newfile.txt

For the sake of completeness, the VBScript code: Dim fso, inF, outF, sLine Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set inF = fso.OpenTextFile("myfile.txt", 1) Set outF = fso.OpenTextFile("outfile.txt", 2, True) Do Until inF.AtEndOfStream sLine = inF.ReadLine outF.WriteLine Left(sLine, 9) & " " _ & Right(sLine, Len(sLine) - 9) Loop