Re: text parsing

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Carolyn Marenger wrote:
McKirahan wrote:
"Carolyn Marenger" <cajunk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7c0f$4795ea54$cf70133e$1079@xxxxxxxxxxxx
McKirahan wrote:
"Carolyn Marenger" <cajunk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:74fb1$479501d1$cf70133e$7458@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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.


That I know. Can you recommend any software for documenting the database design? Should I stick to ye old word processor?

Thanks, Carolyn
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: text parsing
    ... I want to take a bunch of text files (rtf), read them in and dump the ... What would the target database be -- MySQL? ... A bunch is about a dozen. ... 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. ...
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  • Re: text parsing
    ... I want to take a bunch of text files (rtf), read them in and dump the ... What would the target database be -- MySQL? ... A bunch is about a dozen. ... 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. ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • Re: text parsing
    ... What would the target database be -- MySQL? ... A bunch is about a dozen. ... Any chance the RTF files are online so I could look at them? ... Using those 86 RTF files it created a 10MB MS-Access database. ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • Re: text parsing
    ... What would the target database be -- MySQL? ... A bunch is about a dozen. ... Any chance the RTF files are online so I could look at them? ... climate, geography, season, encounter level, time of day, proximity to ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • Re: text parsing
    ... I want to take a bunch of text files (rtf), read them in and dump the ... What would the target database be -- MySQL? ... A bunch is about a dozen. ... 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. ...
    (comp.lang.php)