Mikel J. Bancroft, a student at Berkeley, wrote a nice
little perl script for me last fall. It started out as
just a way to move data from ace dumps to spreadsheet files
(comma separated fields, one line = one spreadsheet row)
and has proven to be generally useful in extracting
data for a variety of porting problems. I just used
it to make up a set of 3000 mailing labels, e.g.
It allow the user to set up a template in a configuration
file so that as an ace dump is read, any object whose
class matches a template in the configuration file is
output in a format defined in the template. You can
have multiple templates per class, and multiple classes
per configuration file.
It also allows string-mapping using a subset of typical
unix regular expression syntax. The mapping is also
specified in the configuration file.
The user can change the field delimiters. For example,
setting the field delimiter to newline, and using the string
mapping feature, new ace files can be produced. But
more mundane separators like tab and colon are also supported.
The program is pretty much limited to simple tag : value
and it cannot "follow" tags or anything fancy like that.
If you're interested, it's available now as
ftp://s27w007.pswfs.gov/ACEDB/aceformat1_1.tar
and is about 25K bytes. The tar file includes the
program, a manual page and some short samples. The
file will also be in the official ACEDB tool archive
at ftp://weeds.mgh.harvard.edu/acedb_dev real soon
now.
I wouldn't say we're supporting this software, but
I'd be happy to catalogue improvements. Feel free
to redistribute as long as Mikel's name remains attached.
Have fun,
--bks
--
Bradley K. Sherman | Institute of Forest Genetics
bks at s27w007.pswfs.gov | P.O. Box 245
510-559-6437 FAX:510-559-6440 | Berkeley, CA 94701 USA
<a href="http://s27w007.pswfs.gov/~bks/">Dendrome Project</a>
