Almost 11pm here and with everyone’s help I’ve created the final file. 80,000 lines of a csv file. ie. The original serial number plus the encoded number. Tomorrow morning I have to “present” this as a solution. If it fails it’s no big deal but it’s looking very good.
One thing I’m not sure of is the character I’ve used as the delimiter. Ive use the standard comma. But now I’m wondering what would happen if the comma was part of the “encoded” text. The encoded text includes non-standard ascii characters, so if one of those was the comma, then what would happen?
If a csv reads from left to right to the delimeter, then maybe it’s ok. OR I could us a tab as the delimeter?