>Is there some elegant VBA way to remove rtf encoding from txt files? I
>have huge (60MB) txt files (exports from a database) containing
>'{*filter*}' Eastern European and Baltic characters and also rtf encoding
>that should be partially removed, i.e. all codes except the font codes
>and the text itself of course. Opening in Word is not an option,
>because the files are too large.
>Being a real amateur at VBA I couldn't come up with anything better
>than this:
>With smaller test files I have tried cheating on Word97 by reading the
>files line by line (all text segments are on one line), writing them
>one by one to a dummy file that contains the exact rtf preamble of the
>source file, putting {\rtf before and } after, rename the file with
>.rtf extension and then open this file in W97 so this one segment is
>displayed exactly as formatted. If the input string does not contain
>any font codes ({\fxx) I select it, assign the selection (which only
>contains unformatted text) to a string and write this unformatted
>string to the target file; if it does contain a font code I do not
>select it, but write it 'as is' (with rtf encoding) to the target file
>with a marker, so I can remove the superfluous formatting after
>reimporting the lot into the database. Unfortunately, this database
>does not permit to search on formatting characteristics, as you may
>have guessed.
>This really is an awkward procedure, extremely slow with all this file
>opening, closing and renaming, and after a while W97 gets tired and
>protests with an 'out of virtual memory' message. By the way, is there
>a VBA command to free up memory?
>Sorry to be so long winded, but I hope I've clearly stated my problem.
>Surely someone will tell me that my approach so far is pathetic and
>redirect my efforts?

>Many thanks,
>Mark