<div dir="ltr">Even if it isn't that large, you may benefit from Pads, as they have a nice way to describe the data. (Once you get it parsed, tho, they you could come back to Racket if you wanted at that point.)<div style> <br>Robby</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Matthias Felleisen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu" target="_blank">matthias@ccs.neu.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br> If you are talking about really large, really not quite properly formatted data sets,<br> you want to look up the PADS project at<br> <br> <a href="http://www.padsproj.org" target="_blank">http://www.padsproj.org</a><br> <br> It's a product from ATT Labs (which is a Bell Labbs 'baby') and they apparently used it on their billing data.<br> <br> If you are looking at a few megabytes, any of our parser tools will do perhaps starting with 'parser-tools/'.<br> <span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br> -- Matthias<br> </font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> On May 9, 2013, at 3:47 PM, David Vanderson <<a href="mailto:david.vanderson@gmail.com">david.vanderson@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br> <br> > I've got character-based invoices from old systems that look roughly like (but much bigger):<br> ><br> > DATE DESC CREDIT DEBIT<br> > 01/01/2013 SERVICES $1234.50<br> > 01/01/2013 PAYMENT $1000.00<br> ><br> > BALANCE $234.50<br> ><br> ><br> > I don't know exactly how they're formatted, so I'm working from examples. My initial plan was to hand-code a dumb parser with regular expressions, but I suspect there's a better way. In particular, it'd be nice to have some leeway as to exact positions of data, and hopefully some nice error reporting and recovery abilities.<br> ><br> > Can anyone point me towards a parsing technique that would lend itself to this problem?<br> ><br> > Thanks,<br> > Dave<br> > ____________________<br> > Racket Users list:<br> > <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/users" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/users</a><br> <br> <br> ____________________<br> Racket Users list:<br> <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/users" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/users</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>