Posted by The Natural Philosopher on 01/23/08 15:30

Carolyn Marenger wrote:
> 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.

Only if

1/. It was los angeles

2/. They had all taken too many mind enhacing drugs.

Otherwise its likely to be Viles disease, at the most interesting ;-)

> 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'.
>

Go full database surely. The art is to define the 'monster' table with
extensibility for all the monster classes one might encounter.
When doing ANYTHING based on a database, the most important thing is to
spend time designing table layouts. And write a data dictionary. And
keep it up to date.





> Thanks, Carolyn

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