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Posted by Carolyn Marenger on 01/23/08 13:03
McKirahan wrote:
> "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.
>
Yes, they are online. Yes, you can look at them. Yes, those are the
files except I only care about the 16 monster files. Yes, this is a one
time effort.
My goal is to create a encounter generation program - where I key in
climate, geography, season, encounter level, time of day, proximity to
civilization, and the application gives me a suggested random encounter
suited to the scenario. For example, if the party was wandering around
the city sewers on a hot summer night, they might encounter a pack of
giant rats being led by a were rat. I would then want the program to
determine how many rats, how many hit points each, and any other
pertinent variable data, including what weapons and treasure the wererat
was carrying and using.
Having the rtfs loaded into a database like your script does, would
enable faster searches, it would not go the next step and perform the
various calculations based on the results of the searches. It is a good
start, but if it has stripped any of the rtf encoding, it may make it
harder to have a script find the various 'fields'.
Thanks, Carolyn
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