Mid Function. Reading of files

[peachtea]

hi

I need help in reading some text in a textfile. I can read line by line but what i wanted is to read character by character

Example
Mary had a little lamb
Jane had a little dogs

I want the name of the person as well as the animal type and i wrote:

Dim person : person = Mid(testfile.ReadLine, 1,4)
Dim animal : animal = Mid(testfile.ReadLine, 19,4)

but the output will be "Mary" and "dogs"

whereby i wld need the output to be:
"Mary" "lamb"
"Jane" "dogs"

Pls help. Thanks alot

[ALL]

you should try regular expressions, it makes life alot eassier in the long run, even though microsoft makes regexs hard to use...

mystring = "Mary had a little lamb"

Set regexp = New RegExp

regexp.Pattern = "^([a-zA-Z]+) .* ([a-zA-Z]+)$"

regexp.IgnoreCase = False
regexp.Global = False

Set matches = regexp.Execute(mystring)
document.writeln(matches(0).SubMatches(0) + " is a name<br>")
document.writeln(matches(0).SubMatches(1) + " is an animal<br>")