Question

There is about 2000 lines of this, so manually would probably take more work than to figure out a way to do ths programatically. It only needs to work once so I’m not concerned with performance or anything.

<tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>Alberta (AB)</td></tr> <tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>British Columbia (BC)</td></tr> <tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>Manitoba (MB)</td></tr> 

Basically its formatted like this, and I need to divide it into 4 parts, Country Name, Country Abbreviation, Division Name and Division Abbreviation.

In keeping with my complete lack of efficiency I was planning just to do a string.Replace on the HTML tags after I broke them up and then just finding the index of the opening brackets and grabbing the space delimited strings that are remaining. Then I realized I have no way of keeping track of which is the country and which is the division, as well as figuring out how to group them by country.

So is there a better way to do this? Or better yet, an easier way to populate a database with Country and Provinces/States? I looked around SO and the only readily available databases I can find dont provide the full name of the countries or the provinces/states or use IPs instead of geographic names.

Answer 1

1. Paste it into a spreadsheet. Some spreadsheets will parse the HTML table for you.

2. Save it as a .CSV file and process it that way. Or. Add a column to the spreadsheet that says something like the following:

   =’INSERT INTO COUNTRY(CODE,NAME) VALUES=(” & A1 & ”,” & B1 & ”);’

Then you have a column of INSERT statements that you can cut, paste and execute.

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Edit

Be sure to include the <table> tag when pasting into a spreadsheet.

<table><tr><th>country</th><th>name></th></tr> <tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>Alberta (AB)</td></tr> <tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>British Columbia (BC)</td></tr> <tr><td>Canada (CA)</td><td>Manitoba (MB)</td></tr> </table> 

Processing a CSV file requires almost no parsing. It’s got quotes and commas. Much easier to live with than XML/HTML.