Speeding up looping through a textfile in vbs

Good afternoon,

I have a problem with my code where im looping through a textfile. The textfile has approx 10,000 lines so I came up with using the instr search function to find the line number by finding the character number in which the "test name" appears and then using the mid function and counting left to find the line number.

eg.

000004###24503###Open Account Web ISA single###2#########Please enter your first name.###False#########Mr############callie####################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################666###Imagenericpassword###Ops####################################################开发者_高级运维###################################################################################Cash ISA 2009 / 2010##########################################################################################################################################################################################################################################

So in this case it finds "Open Account Web ISA single" and counts left to find 000004. So this saves me looping through 10,000 lines.

So next I split this line into an array using ### as a delimeter, this results in lots of empty "columns" since they were empty when i concatinated the data from excel. This leaves me with a total of around 247 columns. My issue is I dont want to really loop through 247 columns since lots of them contain...well nothing. Is there a quicker way for me to do this?

I used to use excel but its far too slow.

You can remove the empty columns:

Set re = New RegExp
re.Pattern = "(###){2,}"
re.Global = True
withoutEmptyCols=re.Replace(input,"###")

This is the result for your example:

000004###24503###Open Account Web ISA single###2###Please enter your first name.###False###Mr###callie###666###Imagenericpassword###Ops###Cash ISA 2009 / 2010###