The Open action allows you to set the delimiter for the file, remove the spaces from the file, and choose an appropriate encoding for the file.

Once you create a bot, perform the following steps to open a CSV or text file using the Open action.
Note:
  • If a double quotation mark (") is the last element of the last line of the CSV/TXT file, the bot encounters an error during runtime.
  • When you use the CSV/TXT > Open action to open a CSV file, read it, and assign it to a table, then write it to a file using the Data table > Write to file action, the automation interprets any commas in the header or cell data as delimiters. For instance, if three consecutive cells contain data like "abc", "bcd", "efd", the final output will enclose each in triple double quotes, resulting in """abc""", """bcd""", """efd""".

Procedure

  1. Double-click or drag the Open action from the CSV/TXT package in the Actions palette.
  2. Select any of the following options to specify the location of the CSV or text file to open:
    • Control Room file: Enables you to open a file from the Control Room.
    • Desktop file: Enables you to open a file from the device. This field also accepts the file path input as a string variable or global value.
      Note: When you enter a file path in the Desktop file field or browse a particular file from the system, wherein the file path is separated by the \ character and save the bot, the \ character is changed to / as the bot uses / to separate file paths. Your bots continue to run successfully even if the \ is changed to / during bot execution.
    • Variable: Enables you to open a file by specifying a file variable.
    The Open action supports file streaming. You can use one of the supported actions to create a streamable file variable and assign the variable to a file available in a cloud storage. This variable is available only within the current session as global values do not support streamable file variables. For more information about file stream and supported packages, see File streaming using file variable.
  3. Enable the Contains header check box if the file contains a header row and you want to retrieve values from that row.
  4. Select any of the following options to specify the Delimiter used in the file:
    • Comma
    • Tab
    • Regional list separator: Enables you to specify the delimiter as configured in the regional settings of the Windows operating system. If the List Separator in the Windows regional settings is modified, then the CSV file should also contain that character as a delimiter.
    • Newline
    • Other: Enables you to specify a delimiter other than the options listed above.
  5. Select the Trim leading spaces and Trim trailing spaces check boxes to remove the leading and trailing spaces from the data extracted from the CSV/TXT file.
  6. Select an option from the Encoding list to specify the encoding that is applied on the file. Data from the CSV/TXT file will be retrieved based on the selected encoding option even if the input file has a different encoding.
    • ANSI: Used to encode Latin alphabet.
    • UTF8: Can encode all possible characters.
    • UNICODE
    • Win1251: used to encode languages that use the Cyrillic script, including Bulgarian, Russian, and Serbian.
    • UTF-16LE: ignores the byte order mark (BOM) Unicode character at the beginning of file.
    • Default: identifies file encoding. This option supports UTF-8, UTF-16LE, and UTF-16BE file encoding.
    Note: Shift-JIS files must use ANSI as encoding to read text file content.
  7. Click Save.

Next steps

Use the Read action to retrieve the data from CSV/TXT file and assign them to a table variable. You can use the loop action to retrieve each row of data from the file or table variable and assign them to the record variable for further operations.