Question

I’m trying to help my dad out — he gave me an export from a scheduling application at his work. We are trying to see if we can import it into a mysql database so he/co-workers can collaborate online with it.

I’ve tried a number of different methods but none seem to work right — and this is not my area of specialties.

Export can be seen here: http://roikingon.com/export.txt

Any help / advice on how to go about parsing this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks !!

Answer 1

I’ve made an attempt to write a (somewhat dynamic) fixed-with-column parser. Take a look: http://codepad.org/oAiKD0e7 (it’s too long for SO, but it’s mostly just “data”).

What I’ve noticed

• Text-Data is left aligned with padding on the right like "hello___" (_ = space)
• Numerical data is right aligned with padding on the left "___42"

If you want to use my code there’s yet stuff to do:

• The record types 12.x have variable column count (after some static columns), you’d have to implement another “handler” for it
• Some of my width’s are most probably wrong. I think there is a system (like numbers are 4 characters long and text 8 characters long, with some variations for special cases). Someone with domain knowledge and more than one sample file could figure out the columns.
• Getting the raw-data out is only the first step, you have to map the raw-data to some useful model and write that model to the database.