Substrings And Reading In Files

I know that I need to use substrings, but I'm not sure how to implement them. All of the names are red in from the file "employees.txt".

Using the file Employees.txt

1) Scan the file and create user ids for each person according to the following scheme

a) Take the first and last character of the first name, convert them to upper case

b) Take the first and last character of the last name, convert them to upper case

c) Concatenate the results from a and b
i) Example: John Brown would yield => JNBN

d) Add the length of the first name to the length of the last name, disregarding spaces

e) Concatenate the result from step c to the result of step d
i) Example: John Brown would yield => JNBN9

f) Concatenate a four digit number to the end of this.
i) The numbers should begin with 0000 and increment by 1
ii) Example: If John Brown is the fifth name in the list the resulting UserID would be => JNBN90004

2) Display the user ids in four columns with a width of 14