OpenEuphoria

Re: my dilemma -- hundreds of record types

• Posted by Kat <kat at kogeijin.com> Nov 15, 2002
• 435 views

On 15 Nov 2002, at 9:29, Chris Saik wrote:

> 
> Hello Eu folks!
> 
> I am attempting to develop an application that will
> read records from a daily FTP feed, sort the records
> according to type, display pertinent information on
> each record, and send that information to subscribers
> based on their subscription options.
> 
> Each record has a corresponding template with variable
> length fields. The fields are delimited by tags.  Some
> of the fields are optional, and thus even the tags
> thenselves do not appear in those records that do not
> use them.  Here is a view of one of the smaller
> templates, with sample information:
> 
> <PRESOL>
> <DATE>1114
> <YEAR>02

<snip>

> There are 9 major template types, but since a lot of
> the fields are optional it boosts the number of
> different record variations to hundreds.  The only
> tags that truly remain constant are the first and last
> (<PRESOL and </PRESOL> in the example above) and a few
> others strewn throughout the record.  
> 
> What is, in your opinion, the best way to read in all
> of these record variations so that I can easily work
> with and manage the data?

Use gets() to read the file into a sequence, and then a simple loop thru the 
sequence, to find the tags you are looking for.

<untested>
ftpdata = fptdata & {gets(readfile)}

<untested>
function findtag(sequence tag)
for loop = 1 to length(ftpdata) do
  if match(tag,ftpdata[loop]) then 
    return ftpdata[loop] 
  end if
end for
return ""
end function

<untested>
function ListAllTags
sequence total, temp
total = ""
temp = ""
for loop = 1 to length(ftpdata) do
 temp = match(".",ftpdata[loop])
 if not match(temp,total) then
   total = total & {temp}
 end if
end for
return total
end function

Kat