AutoHotkey webinar- Copying / Editing / Saving files & Folders

In this AutoHotkey Webinar we covered: Working with Files & Folders 

Video Hour 1: High-level:

1. Moving / Copying / Deleting Files / Folders
   1. File Copy / Move
   2. File Delete
   3. Loop Files & Folders
2. Creating / Editing Files
   1. File Encoding
   2. FileRead & FileAppend
   3. Loop FileRead & FileReadLine
   4. File Object

Video Hour 2: Q&A

Script Highlight-  Locker

• Kill power to monitors & block most keys & mouse
• Great to use instead of using Windows + L and having to enter yoiur crazy corporate password

Copy, Move, Delete : Files & Folders

FileCopy – SourcePattern, DestPattern [, Flag]

• FileCopy copies files only. To copy a single folder (including its subfolders), use FileCopyDir. To instead copy the contents of a folder (all its files and subfolders), see the examples section of FileCopy

FileCopyDir – FileCopyDir, Source, Dest [, Flag]

• Copies a folder along with all its sub-folders and files (similar to xcopy)
• FileCopyDir copies a single folder. If the destination directory structure doesn’t exist it will be created if possible

FileMove – FileMove, SourcePattern, DestPattern [, Flag]

• FileMove moves files only. To move or rename a single folder, use FileMoveDir

FileDelete – FileDelete, FilePattern

• To remove an entire folder, along with all its sub-folders and files, use FileRemoveDir
• To delete a read-only file, first remove the read-only attribute. For example: FileSetAttrib, -R, C:\My File.txt

Looping Files & Folders

Loop (files & folders) – Loop, Files, FilePattern [, Mode]      Mode:  D=Directories, F=Files, R=Recursive

– FilePattern: The name of a single file or folder, or a wildcard pattern

• Retrieves the specified files or folders, one at a time
• A file-loop is useful when you want to operate on a collection of files and/or folders, one at a time
• The following Special Variables exist in any file-loop
  • A_LoopFileName
  • A_LoopFileExt
  • A_LoopFileFullPath
  • A_LoopFileLongPath
  • A_LoopFileShortPath
  • A_LoopFileShortName
  • A_LoopFileDir
  • A_LoopFileTimeModified
  • A_LoopFileTimeCreated
  • A_LoopFileTimeAccessed
  • A_LoopFileAttrib
  • A_LoopFileSize
  • A_LoopFileSizeKB
  • A_LoopFileSizeMB

File Encoding

• Sets the default encoding for FileRead, FileReadLine, Loop Read, FileAppend, and FileOpen
• Encoding can be one of the following values:
• UTF-8: Unicode UTF-8, equivalent to CP65001
• UTF-16: Unicode UTF-16 with little endian byte order, equivalent to CP1200
• UTF-8-RAW or UTF-16-RAW: As above, but no Byte Order Mark (BOM*) is written when a new file is created
• CPnnn: a code page with numeric identifier nnn. See Code Page Identifiers. (UTF-8 is CP65001, UTF-16 is CP1200)
• Empty or omitted: the system default ANSI code page, which is also the default setting* The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character, U+FEFF byte order mark (BOM), whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program consuming the text

FileRead & FileAppend

File Read FileRead, OutputVar, Filename

• Reads file’s content into a variable
• FileRead, Var, *P65001 %file_path% ;-Read in the file using UTF-8 Encoding
• When the goal is to load all or a large part of a file into memory, FileRead performs much better than using a file-reading loop.
• FileOpen() provides more advanced functionality than FileRead, such as reading or writing data at a specific location in the file without reading the entire file into memory
• When Reading / Writing to a file many times, FileObject is much faster as it does not open/close the file each time

FileAppend FileAppend [, Text, Filename, Encoding]

• Writes text to the end of a file (first creating the file, if necessary)
• FileAppend,%data%,%File_Name%.txt,UTF-8
• To overwrite an existing file, delete it with FileDelete prior to using FileAppend
• * don’t forget to add a line break at the end of each row!

LoopFileRead, FileReadLine

Loop (read file contents)   Loop, Read, InputFile [,OutputFile]

• A file-reading loop is useful when you want to operate on each line contained in a text file, one at a time. It performs better than using FileReadLine because:
  • the file can be kept open for the entire operation
  • the file does not have to be re-scanned each time to find the requested line number.
• Lines up to 65,534 characters long can be read. If the length of a line exceeds this, its remaining characters will be read during the next loop iteration
• To load an entire file into a variable, use FileRead because it performs much better than a loop (especially for large files).

FileReadLine  FileReadLine, OutputVar, Filename, LineNum

• Reads the specified line from a file and stores the text in a variable
• It is strongly recommended to use this command only for small files, or in cases where only a single line of text is needed. To scan and process a large number of lines (one by one), use a file-reading loopfor best performance. To read an entire file into a variable, use FileRead

FileObject

FileOpen – file := FileOpen(Filename, Flags [, Encoding])

• Flags (r=Read, w=Write, a=Append, rw=Read/Write , h=Handle, -rwd=Lock file/deny access)

ReadLine–  TextLine := File.ReadLine()

• Reads a line of text from the file and advances the file pointer

Seek–  TextLine := File.Seek()

• Distance to move, in bytes. Lower values are closer to the beginning of the file

AtEOF (End of File)- IsAtEOF := File.AtEOF

• Retrieves a non-zero value if the file pointer has reached the end of the file, otherwise zero.

WriteLine–  File.WriteLine([String])

• Writes a string of characters followed by `n or `r`n depending on the flags used to open the file. Advances the file pointer

Encoding– File.Encoding

• RetrievedEncoding and NewEncoding is a numeric code page identifier (e.g. CP65001)

Close–  File.Close()

• Although the file is closed automatically when the object is freed, it is recommended to close the file as soon as possible

COM Objects & DLL call

• FileSystemObject– MSDN
• Winmgmts – Enumerating Folders & Properties
• Shell File Operation