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Posted by McKirahan on 01/22/08 15:16
"Carolyn Marenger" <cajunk@marenger.com> wrote in message
news:7c0f$4795ea54$cf70133e$1079@PRIMUS.CA...
> McKirahan wrote:
> > "Carolyn Marenger" <cajunk@marenger.com> wrote in message
> > news:74fb1$479501d1$cf70133e$7458@PRIMUS.CA...
> >> Can someone point me in the direction of some good documentation on
text
> >> parsing?
> >>
> >> I want to take a bunch of text files (rtf), read them in and dump the
> >> contents in a database. The files are effectively a flat file
database,
> >> with I suspect some fairly intricate programming needed to process the
> >> files. Unfortunately, they are laid out for human readability, not
data
> >> conversion.
> >
> > A few questions.
> >
> > How many is a "bunch"?
> > What would the target database be -- MySQL?
> > What table and column structures do you envision?
> > Perhaps simply a single table with two columns:
> > filename (key) and a memo field containing the data?
> > What is the purpose behind doing this?
> >
> A few answers
>
> A bunch is about a dozen. Basically one large file that was broken into
> sixteen subsets, following the initial letter for each record.
>
> The target database would be MySQL
>
> I haven't looked too closely at the data, but I think one main table
> with a few linked tables for those cases where there may be more than
> one piece of data for a category. There are about 25 categories to each
> record. Eventually there would be additional structure added around the
> imported data, but that isn't relevant to importing the data itself. (I
> will confirm this before beginning to code.
>
> The purpose: I am a D&D fan and I run games. I would like to be able to
> reference the material and automate much of the process so I don't have
> to lug and reference 20lbs of books.
Any chance the RTF files are online so I could look at them?
Perhaps http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35?
http://www.wizards.com/d20/files/v35/SRD.zip contains 88 RTF files.
Also, I gather, this might be a one-time effort; correct?
Not what you requested but ...
I've developed a VBScript solution that takes the following approach:
for a given folder, each RTF file is opened in MS-Word and saved
as a text file which is opened and read then saved in an MS-Access
database table containing 3 columns: id (AutoNumber), file, data.
Using those 86 RTF files it created a 10MB MS-Access database.
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