reading text files from standalone biometric device

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VS2010

Good day!
I'm having a problem reading .dat from a standalone biometric device, they give me a problem that i should make a system that will read .dat files into a readable format using visual studio 2010, I'm not good in this platform, and im on learning stage, can anyone help me out, or give some reliable sample or source

Example:
when im trying to open data.dat in excel i only get like this:

1 | 5/31/2013 3:00:41 PM | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
1 | 5/31/2013 3:10:22 PM | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
1 | 5/31/2013 3:43:46 PM | 1 | 4 | 1 | 0 |

it has 6 columns, and the only column that is in readable format is the date and time, the id number and other information display as numeric

i hope that someone can help me, i don't have any idea how to do it, thanks in advance

Posted 13-Nov-13 15:45pm

Edwardine Ocampo

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Garth J Lancaster 13-Nov-13 21:56pm

Im not sure what your issue is - that file is readable

Maybe you should start by looking at the specs for the device, finding the file format, and seeing what the columns should contain - then you'll know how to interpret them

As it is, if each line from that file is read as a string, you can split the string on '|' to get the fields .. you just need to know the meaning of the fields

'g'

Garth J Lancaster 13-Nov-13 21:57pm

The next issue before figuring out what to do next, is thinking about the question 'what are we going to do with this data' - store it, query it ?

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 13-Nov-13 22:28pm

A "*.dat" file is not anything certain, it can be anything. Really, I don't see any sense in this question. Get to the vendor technical documentation, and so on...
—SA

Richard MacCutchan 14-Nov-13 4:19am

Using Excel you can load the file using the text and delimiter options. However you have not really explained what you are trying to do with the content.

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