Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

  ◄Summary►  ◄Details►  ◄Example►                ◄Contents►  ◄Index►  ◄Back►
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 GET [#]filenumber%[,[recordnumber&][,variable]]
 PUT [#]filenumber%[,[recordnumber&][,variable]]
 
 Usage Notes
   ■ Do not use GET or PUT on ISAM files.
 
   ■ If you omit recordnumber&, the next record or byte (the one after the
     last GET or PUT, or the one pointed to by the last SEEK) is read into
     the buffer (GET) or written to (PUT). The largest possible record number
     is 2,147,483,647 (equivalent to 2^31 -1).
 
   ■ The first record or byte position in a file is 1.
 
   ■ A record cannot be longer than 32,767 bytes.
 
   ■ If you specify a variable, you do not need either:
     • CVI, CVL, CVS, CVD, or CVC to convert record fields to numbers
     • MKI$, MKL$, MKS$, MKD$, or MKC$ to convert numeric fields before
       writing
     See: ◄CVx Functions►  ◄MKx$ Functions►
 
   ■ You cannot use a FIELD statement with the file if you use the variable
     argument. See: ◄FIELD Statement►
 
   ■ For random-access files, you can use any variable as long as the length
     of the variable is less than or equal to the length of the record.
     Usually, a record variable defined to match the fields in a data record
     is used.
 
   ■ For binary-mode files, you can use any variable. The GET statement reads
     as many bytes as there are in the variable; the PUT statement writes as
     many bytes to the file as there are bytes in the variable.
 
   ■ When you use a variable-length string variable, the statement reads
     (GET) or writes (PUT) as many bytes as there are characters in the
     string's value. For example, the following two statements use GET to
     read 10 bytes from file number 1:
 
         VarStrings$=STRING$ (10, " ")
         GET #1,,VarString$
 
   ■ The following two statements use PUT to write 15 bytes to file number 1:
 
         VarString$=STRING$(15, "X")
         PUT #1,,VarString$
 
   ■ You can omit the arguments recordnumber&, variable, or both. If you
     omit the recordnumber& but include a variable, you must still include
     the commas:
 
         GET #4,,FileBuffer
         PUT #4,,FileBuffer
 
   ■ If you omit both arguments, do not include the commas:
 
         GET #4
         PUT #4
 
   ■ GET and PUT statements allow fixed-length input and output for Visual
     Basic communications files. Use GET carefully, because if there is a
     communications failure, GET waits indefinitely for recordnumber&
     characters.
 
   ■ When you use GET with the FIELD statement, you can use INPUT # or LINE
     INPUT # after GET to read characters from the random-access file
     buffer. You can use the EOF function after a GET statement to see if
     GET went beyond the end of the file.
     See: ◄EOF Function►  ◄INPUT Statement►  ◄LINE INPUT Statement►
 
   ■ When using a file buffer defined by a FIELD statement, LSET, RSET,
     PRINT #, and WRITE # can be used to put characters in the random-file
     buffer before executing a PUT statement.
     See: ◄FIELD Statement►    ◄LSET Statement►     ◄RSET Statement►
          ◄PRINT # Statement►  ◄WRITE # Statement►
 
   ■ In the case of WRITE #, Visual Basic pads the buffer with spaces up to
     the carriage return. If you attempt to read or write past the end of
     the buffer, Visual Basic generates the error message, "FIELD overflow."