Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

You may already be familiar with the Macro Scheduler debugger and know how to set code breakpoints. But did you know you can set variable breakpoints too? With a variable breakpoint you can cause execution to pause when a specified variable becomes equal to a given value.

You will find the “Variable Breakpoints” option under the “Debug” menu in the code editor.

You can set one or more variables and values. Then at any point during execution when one of those conditions occurs the macro will pause and allow you to debug.

This can be very useful when you are not sure where an issue is occurring but you may know that a specific set of data causes a problem that you want to debug.

Macro Scheduler‘s ReadFile and ReadLn functions understand ANSI, UTF8 and Unicode files – as long as they have a valid BOM header.  But a client recently needed to read in a file with a missing BOM.  So we wrote a little bit of VBScript which reads the binary stream in, and then outputs a UTF8 encoded file.  

Here’s the code:

VBSTART
Sub UTFConvert(filename)
  Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  txt = fso.OpenTextFile(filename, 1, False, -1).ReadAll
  Set stream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
  stream.Open
  stream.Type     = 2 'text
  stream.Position = 0
  stream.Charset  = "utf-8"
  stream.WriteText txt
  stream.SaveToFile filename, 2
  stream.Close
End Sub
VBEND

//Convert it to UTF8
VBRun>UTFConvert,%SCRIPT_DIR%\data.txt

//Now we can read it :-)
ReadFile>%SCRIPT_DIR%\data.txt,theFileData