Summary, Tips, and Tricks on Strings and File I/O **new** 2004/06/22 11:48:35.528 GMT-5 2004/06/22 11:49:23.316 GMT-5 National Instruments certification@ni.com Malan Shiralkar mshiralkar05@hotmail.com Harika Basana ilsai@rice.edu Elizabeth Gregory lizzardg@rice.edu National Instruments certification@ni.com National Instruments LabVIEW string I/O Strings group sequences of ASCII characters. Use the string control and indicator to simulate text entry boxes and labels. To minimize the space that a string object occupies, right-click the object and select Show Scrollbar from the shortcut menu. Use the String functions located on the Functions>>All Functions>>String palette to edit and manipulate strings on the block diagram. Use the Build Text Express VI to convert a numeric value to a string. Use the Scan From String function to convert a string to a numeric value. Right-click the Scan From String function and select Edit Scan String from the shortcut menu to create or edit a format string. Use the File I/O VIs and functions to handle all aspects of file I/O. Use the high-level File I/O VIs to perform common I/O operations. Use the low-level File I/O VI and functions and the Advanced File I/O functions located to control each file I/O operation individually. Use the Express File I/O VIs for simple datalogging operations. When writing to a file, you open, create, or replace a file, write the data, and close the file. Similarly, when you read from a file, you open an existing file, read the data, and close the file. To access a file through a dialog box, leave file path unwired in the Open/Create/Replace File VI. To write data to a spreadsheet file, the string must be formatted as a spreadsheet string, which is a string that includes delimiters, such as tabs. Use the Format Into File function to format string, numeric, path, and Boolean data as text and write the text to a file.