Orion Vianna wrote:
> Thanks for the comment! :o)
>
> Yeah I would love to see a talk on databases with comparisons and a
> introduction to Couchdb :o)
> 
> The data definitely needs to be oriented and in a more normalized form :o)
> I'm trying to find the quickest way to do it. One idea is to organize
> the file in the basic format it is now and then use find/replace editor
> tool or sed to replace carriage returns with commas to make a CSV file.
> I have also put a ~ at the end of each CSV record and used find/replace
> to make it a carriage return to complete the CSV file requirement. (I
> hope I'm making sense :o)
> I have tried it already with success, its still quite a bit of work. I'm
> giving a second try in slightly different way.
> The copying, clicking and dragging inside of Exel or Open Office Calc is
> a bit painful.

Instead of getting to CSV, I think it may make sense to get it to an
intermediate format that has more information about attributes (xml,
json, in a database with named columns, whatever floats your boat).  If
you spend the effort to convert this info once, you really don't want to
be spending the effort to convert it out of CSV in a couple years to
something else.

I've actually started redoing my rails address book app, which I'm happy
to share source code for if you were interested, that ends up using a
similar structure, though you've got a couple more fields than I think
I'm using.  One of the things I put into it was an export to excel
button, which creates the csv on the fly out of the data in the system.

You still have the parsing problem, but once you get over that, then you
 should be golden.

        -Sean

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net                            Linux Users Group
http://dague.net                                 http://mhvlug.org

There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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