Combine text files (XP/UltraEdit)

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Every day my customer has a dozen text files (*.txt) that he needs to combine into one text file. Is there a way to combine them without having to copy and paste the text out of each one? File names are variable (and unpredictable). He’s using a product called UltraEdit, but I’m open to ideas. Thanks!

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Hi Sarah,

What you’re looking for is something like the Unix “cat” command, which concatenates any number of files into a single one.

I’d suggest one of two options (there are certainly many more).

First, that’s a one-liner in Perl. Perl is available for free from http://www.activestate.com. With Perl installed, you could do this at the DOS command line:

> perl -ne "print" file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt > bigfile.txt

If you’re not interested in that approach, there are a few folks out there who have ported common Unix commands, like cat, to Windows. Check out: http://www.kilowattsoftware.com/PoofPage.htm%5B/url%5D. With cat installed, you could do this at the DOS command line:

> cat file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt > bigfile.txt

If it were my decision, I’d create a Perl script (just a text file) named “cat.pl”, consisting of the following:

while () {print};

And save that in C:Windows, so it’s always available, right from the command line, like this:

> cat file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt > bigfile.txt

In fact, I just did that, since it actually would be nice to have cat on my Windows machine.

Cheers!

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Thanks, Andrew. That should work. He could probably use the VBA that comes with Office rather than installing something new, but the principle is the same.

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Apparently you can also use the built-in DOS copy command:

> copy file1.txt file2.txt bigfile.txt

The name of the destination file comes last. See http://www.computerhope.com/copyhlp.htm#03%5B/url%5D.

It would be fairly simple to write a VBA macro to do this using the Shell command.

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you’ve posted this in the Word forum I’m assuming that the end target is a Word file (albeit in text format)? In which case a wee VBA routine to create a new empty document followed by a loop to insert each of the .txt files from a chosen directory. Something along the lines of

Documents.Add
ChDir “C:txtfiles”
txtName = Dir(“*.txt”)
While txtName “”
With Selection
.InsertFile FileName:=txtName, ConfirmConversions:=False
.InsertParagraphAfter
.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
End With
txtName = Dir()
Wend

At the end of this the Word doc contains the contents of the .txt files in the order that the Dir function serves them up – which raises the question of whether they need to be combined in a particular order?

If it is inconvenient to use a fixed directory name then you can always use the FileDialog object to allow navigating to a directory of choice and then selection of the .txt files to deal with – if order was a problem then presumably the dialog could be called repeatedly to choose one file at a time (slow but probably the only way to deal with unpredictable file names if there is a particular order of concatenation required)

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