How can I translate data?

January 19, 2006 2:18 PM

What is a good tool for translating data?

I am trying to translate SGML and import into an Access database. I got a quote from Pervasive for Data Junction, but I didn't like what I saw. Does anyone have any suggestions to other tools that can handle data conversion?

posted by benjh to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What does the SGML data look like?
posted by weston at 2:31 PM on January 19, 2006

What do you mean by translate? Do you have a bunch of SGML documents that you want to store in a database? Or do you want to parse values out of an SGML document and store them in the database?

If its the latter, you could use something like the sgmllib in python to spit out CSV files and import them in to Access. How hard that is depends on how complex the SGML documents are.
posted by gus at 3:00 PM on January 19, 2006

There are several fields that have duplicate entries that I would need to create new tables for, with the identifier number attached. It's medium-complicated.
posted by benjh at 3:46 PM on January 19, 2006

I'd just use Python (or other favorite scripting language) with an SGML parser to spit out SQL that will do what you need in Access. Handling the duplicate entries &c. should be pretty simple with hash tables. If you post a brief description of the goal and some sample data, I'll try to bang out some example code.
posted by pocams at 6:40 PM on January 19, 2006

There are several fields that have duplicate entries that I would need to create new tables for, with the identifier number attached. It's medium-complicated.

In order to normalize the tables? Can you elaborate a bit on this? Medium complicated still might be within the realm of relatively easy python/perl scripting, depending....
posted by weston at 11:04 AM on January 20, 2006