unknown file format

Posted April 15th, 2008 by Charles R. Honce III

I've just signed on as a newbie/trial user. I have a datafile that is of unknown format, only labeled with a .dat extension. I want to parse and add a record to this file, but the parser reader I downloaded from here seems to need to know the format...I DON"T KNOWWWWWWWWWW!!!...I want one of your products to tell me!!!

I've found some patterns, but nothing readily identifiable as field end or record end.

Yeah I could use proly the best parser around Parse O' Matic, but that's mainly for free form text. The dat file I have seems to CONTAIN some ascii but also a lot of nulls.

Can Pervasive do the trick?

Chas

‹ converting to .csv Data Source not find ›

RE: unknown file format

On April 15th, 2008 jterrell said:

Hi Charles,

DataTools can read and "autoparse" data files that contain sufficient metadata that defines the records and fields. However, if your .DAT file does not contain sufficient (or any) metadata, then you would need to define the structure of the file in order to parse it.

I see that you downloaded the Data Viewer, but that DataTools product does not include the ability to manually parse the data file, and cannot autoparse a file with insufficient or no metadata. If your .DAT file contains all readable character data, you may want to download a trial license for the Data Parser for Fixed Text. If your .DAT file contains some character data AND some packed and/or binary data, you may want to download a trial license for the Data Parser for Binary. Each of those Data Parsers includes a visual parser in which you can define the records and fields manually.

Let us know if you need additional assistance.

- Jo