looking for text-parser (not Excel)

[Felix Atagong]

I use Excel most of the time to change data from various customers into a flat-text-file that our company software can read.

For a new project I need a text-parser that will 'work' during the night without human intervention. It has to read the data (from a network drive) and change/save it into the format that I want (basically just rearranging the fields in the fixed length text file and find/replace some stuff). The tool may be small, cheap and cheerful.

I found (freeware) Parse-O-Matic on the web and Microsoft has a free utility called LogParser...

Any thoughts on those, anyone has used these programs before, other solutions?

 

[Oorang]

Hmmm, I'm not clear why we are eschewing custom solutions, but I know LogParser has no official support. It was just something put together by one of MS devolopers and MS made available. That devoloper has since left MS, so I doubt getting support will be super-easy. But text parsing is something you can do quite quickly with VBA or VBS, I'm curious why you do not want to use them?

 

[Felix Atagong]

Yeah, I already gave up LogParser, I'll try doing something with VBA/VBS perhaps. I was just hoping that there was a kind of stand alone utility (a bit like the text import in excel) that would give me a 5 minutes solution...

Oopps, I just realised you have to pay for these things, isn't there a freeware VBA stand alone thingie somewhere?

 

[Oorang]

I have quite a bit of professional experiance with text parsing... What are your specs?

 

[Felix Atagong]

It is a very simple thing really, I receive a log file from an outside computer system that has fixed length fields.

In Excel I would do the following:
clean the doubles -> sort the data.
if the reference field, date field, hour field and status field are identical to the previous entry that entry may be deleted.

I now have a file with unique records and need to put them in the format of my internal computer system.
If the reference field matches a certain parameter, I take the reference, and replace the 'foreign' status (two digit number) with my 'internal' status (a 3 letter code).

Finally I send the new log file to an internal mailbox that is read by my server. I can also put it on an ftp directory... that is the easy part...