VBA - Txt file with two delimiters for rows and columns - excel

Question

I have a .txt file where columns are delimited with | (pipe) but rows are delimited with the following string: _ ~|~ _
Is there a way to import this by delimiting rows based on the string? If I could just do that, I would be able to do text to columns easily.
This is tricky because the space in each row in Notepad is being exhausted. For example:
Policy|Name|Cost _ ~|~ _ 11924|Joe|$20 _ ~|~ _ 154 (end of notepad space)
35|Bob|$40 _ ~|~ _ 18439|Jane|$30 _ ~|~ _ 18492|Ri
chard|$50
I need this to read:
Policy Name Cost
11924 Joe $20
15435 Bob $40
18439 Jane $30
18492 Richard $50
and so on. Note that values at the far right are split because notepad has exhausted its line length.
Thanks for any ideas!

Answer 1

You can pre-process the text before importing to Excel using a more powerful text editor such as TextPad.
In TextPad, do a Replace (F8 key). First let's get rid of your so called "end of notepad space" which I read as line breaks.
Use regular expression to replace double carriage returns "\n\n" with nothing:
Then, replace pipes "\|" with spaces " ":
Then, replace "_ ~ ~ _ " with a carriage return "\n":
This is the final text that should be ready to import into Excel:
Hope that helps! TextPad is a great tool to have around.

Answer 2

You can do this in a single step using a VBA macro.
Read in the entire file to a VBA String variable
Remove the newline characters
Split on the row delimiter
This results in a 1D array
Convert the array to a 2D array
write the results to the worksheet
Do text to columns using the pipe as the delimiter
Option Explicit
'SET REFERENCE to Microsoft Scripting Runtime
Sub ImportSpecial()
Dim FSO As FileSystemObject
Dim TS As TextStream
Dim sFN As Variant
Dim S As String
Dim V As Variant
Dim R As Range
sFN = Application.GetOpenFilename("Text Files (*.txt), *.txt")
If Not sFN = False Then
Set FSO = New FileSystemObject
Set TS = FSO.OpenTextFile(sFN, ForReading, False, TristateFalse)
'Remove the linefeeds
S = TS.ReadAll
S = Replace(S, vbNewLine, "")
'If data is large, will need to transpose manually
V = Application.WorksheetFunction.Transpose(Split(S, "_ ~|~ _"))
Set R = ActiveSheet.Cells(1, 1).Resize(UBound(V), 1)
With R
.EntireColumn.Clear
.Value = V
.TextToColumns Destination:=R(1), _
DataType:=xlDelimited, _
Tab:=False, semicolon:=False, comma:=False, Space:=False, _
other:=True, otherchar:="|"
.EntireColumn.AutoFit
End With
End If
End Sub