Hi Charlotte,
I know you ask in an ms excel programming group but this task, especially if
you have to perform
it repeatedly, may best be done in Perl.
The time taken to process your file you estimate as a week: much quicker to
get say the Windows ActiveState
version of Perl. Then a few lines of Perl script will perform your task with
very little overhead.
Perl was (almost) designed to do just the task you have!
Cheers, Peter

"Charlotte E." wrote in message
...
How to read a .TXT-file line by line?

I would like to read the first line of the .TXT-file,
Perform some action on the read data (the .TXT-line)

Read the next line - perform some action
Read the next line - perfom the action again
etc...

Until all lines of the .TXT-file is read, and the action is performed on
all lines (imported data)

My problem is that I have a HUGE .TXT-file of almost 3.000.000 lines!!!
I'm aware that going through all these lines, one-by-one, will probably
take a week or so, so I have to make my first test-program read a smaller
file, until I'm sure it is working.

But, how to read the file, line by line, in the first place, since I can't
import such a huge file in my trusty old XL2003?

Oh, I case you wonder what the 'action' is, I want to remove those lines
in the .TXT-file that doens't fullfill certain criteria, thus (hopefully
:-) ending up with a .TXT-file of only approx. 105.000 lines, which then
can be converted into a webtable.


Thanks in advance...

CE