@Dorsai6
Thanks for your considering my issue with the Input statement in Excel VBA.
As I said, I am a novice. It might be a security issue - I don't know.
I do have read access to the file.
I think I get the error immediately, on the first read.
I appreciate that you are a MAC user, so do not trouble yourself further. It must be something to do with my Excel 2016 installation or my security settings because, as you say, @JoaXim and @spiderman1804 report that your code works fine.

@Dorsai6
I got your VBA to run.
You were correct, it was a security issue.
Nice routine! Thanks!

I got your VBA to run.

Oh, am I happy to here that. I can't give up on problems like this, but I was running out of ideas. If you are interested I have some other Excel VB that will let you create picklists. I've posted the souce here as an image because the forum software will not let me post the actual code. If you want the code, send me you email address by private message.

@Dorsai6
I have also tested both the ‘playlist load’ and the ‘create playlist’ code of yours and they work perfectly.

I have supposed that in both cases (vpl file to read and exported created vpl file) the files are located in the same folder as the Excel Playlist manager. I also added to ‘load playlist’ an Inputbox to type the vpl original file name and I provided also an initial Clearcontents for the spreadsheet.

Now, the main thing is that, up to now, the ‘load names for ‘names.xml’ does not work at all (I’ll explain later what is the problem). So, I changed the ‘create playlist’ In order to read directly from the first column of the spreadsheet the number of the cards (vg: a0347) which had been previously allocated in the first column.

To do the tests I used a playlist of my own which includes only cards (not individual clips) because they are the result of converting the pfl files into vpl files using the IStripper program.

The test have been successful.

I have Excel 2013 and Windows 10

So Thanks for your very grateful help

Now, lets see why the 'load names' does not works.

The Line input command reads all the contents of the file until it finds a New Line or Return Character.(vbLf, vbCrLf) and the names.xml seems not to have any of such.

So, when you do the first Line Input, the whole document is read and you have reached the EOF. So next Line input gives an error of EOF.

You can check it by means of Debug.print. It seems also that the retrieved file is not complete, probably because the file is too long and it exceeds the number of bytes accepted.

I hope this helps for new recherches.

@JoaXim,

The Line input command reads all the contents of the file until it finds a New Line or Return Character.(vbLf, vbCrLf) and the names.xml seems not to have any of such.

This may be a Mac vs. Windows issue. On my Mac the names.xml file has a Line Feed (CHR 10) at the end of each line but no Carriage Return (CHR 13). Most systems treat either a Line Feed or a Carriage Return as a new line, but I know that some Microsoft Windows applications require both. XML files do not require new line characters, but good practice is to include them for readability.

As a first step, I suggest you open the models.lst file in a text editor like word pad and save it with a new name. That will ususally ***** Windows to replace a single LF with the required LF-CR combination.

As a second step, examine the models.lst to see what it looks like. If you have a tool that will report the contents of the file byte-by-byte, check to see if there is a byte with a decimal value of 10 at the end of each line. XML files are ASCII code and are usually easy to read.

If the names.xml file does not contain either LF or CR characters, you can open the file as a binary file and assemble lines by reading once byte at a time until you encounter a 2-byte sequence with the characters "/>". That should work.

I´ll try it

@Dorsai6

When you read the file "names.xml" then is there a problem. Anytime when iStripper is starting will change the order of 'uid', 'models' and 'outfit'.
You can check this when you read the file "names.xml". Close and restart iStripper and read the file.

You need to identificated the order of this values. And than you can read this values.

Please see the picture.
This is a batch script (Windows) with the same problem.

@spiderman1804,

I'm not sure I understand your message. It makes sense to me the iStripper will periodically update the contents of the names.xml file. I haven't done an exhaustive check, but an eyeball scan of the file appears to show that it is in order by card id. However, my Visual BASIC code does not depend on the card order so I don't think I need to care about this. Have I missed something?

I can see that trying to read the names.xml file while iStripper is updating it could be a problem, but this seems to be a rare event and I didn't bother to test for it. The simple solution would be to only read while iStripper is shut down. This is what I do when I work with the models.lst file.

How to combine different playplists as a new one?
Is there a easy way? Help.

In order to combine two playlists into one, first of all you have to save both playlists individually. Then you load the first playlist in the playlist tab, then, inmediately you load the second playlist and you will have one playlist on top of the other. Now you can save the resulting new bug pkaylist