storing text in a text file for a specified length of time.

mrobertson · 08-01-2005, 09:20 AM

Is there anyway to store text in a text file for a specified length of time? For instance, writing something to a text file and the erasing it two weeks after it was entered.

jim mcnamara · 08-01-2005, 09:40 AM

Put a timestamp on each line of the text file

Code:

23-JAN-2004 14:23 <text goes here>
22-JAN-2004 16:12 <text goes here>

Then run a process to identify "old" date and strip them out

mrobertson · 08-01-2005, 09:47 AM

How do you put a timestamp on a line?

Also what would the process look like to identify the old date?

bigearsbilly · 08-02-2005, 07:19 AM

you can timestamp a file:
touch -t 200501311133 stamp_file (31st jan 2005 11:33)

then use something like

find * -older stamp_file | xargs rm

which finds files older than the timestamp.

jim mcnamara · 08-02-2005, 09:14 AM

I think we don't understand what you want -

Do you want to delete lines of text in one file
or
delete a whole file?

vharishankar · 08-02-2005, 09:20 AM

He's using VB.net and not Linux, I think...

mrobertson · 08-02-2005, 09:48 AM

I have figured out how to add dates but I still dont know how to compare them.

I want to compare the dates that they were entered into thew text file with the date of the prsent day. If they have been in the text file for more than a week I want to delete them.

Can anyone help me with this?

deiussum · 08-02-2005, 10:27 AM

I assume you are using VB .Net for this since you were for your other questions, so here's a quick description of what you could do.

Read in the whole file into an ArrayList, reading it in one line at a time and adding each line as an element of the array.
After the file is read into the array, go through each element of the array. For each line extract the date part. (How you do this depends heavily on the format of the date you use and the way the rest of the line looks, if you are using comma-delimited fields for example, a simple string.split should suffice.)
Convert the date string to a DateTime object using the DateTime.Parse method.
Compare the newly created DateTime object with a DateTime object representing the oldest entry you want to keep.
If the date you read in is older than the dates you want to keep, remove that line from the array list
Continue the last few steps above until you've compared all entries in the file
When done, re-write your file to disk with only the remaining entries in your ArrayList

I leave converting that into code to you...