Carl Harvey

Help.

I volunteered to receive competition forms (via email) for a client and to print them and then data capture the information into a database. Unfortunately for me I am getting over 100 responses per day.

Does anyone know how I can extract the information from plain text emails into a database.

RichB

Mac or PC?
Mac - I can help, PC I can't...

mattski

if it is a Solaris/Linux box no prob

lemon squeezy as long as you are willing to install a couple of perl modules and mysql.

chiark

PERL and MySQL are your friends. Even on a windows box, PERL was practically made for this sort of task.

Your eyes will be opened to the power of the language.

(If I was being pedantic, I should point out that there's a "Non Scooby Related" area for this sort of thing, but I'm not so I wont)

GranTurismo

Hello,

Depending on the structure of the text you may be able to export them into a csv file or via word into excel

Carl Harvey

Thanks for the help

Its PC not mac and Win 98.

chiark & mattski how would I go about using PERL and MySQL?

Is there an easy way to automate exporting to say excel?

kurtw

Try downloading a product called listking from the internet.

Sorry I can't tell you where to obtain it, but I'm pretty sure it'll do the job you are looking for.

Regards
Kurt

KF

Surely the quickest way would be to write a macro (or record one) to run under your chosen MS app.
Tools->Macros->Record.

Edit: Just thought I would illucidate. If you have a more recent version of Excel, you can open plain text files. It runs you through a set of options, so that you should be able to do some of the work then.
Then run your macro which will do a search for you keywords and copy and paste to a seperate sheet.
KF.

[This message has been edited by KF (edited 24 January 2001).]

RichardH

If you need a good search engine then I've been using a tool called WebFerret (www.ferretsoft.com). Its quick and usually finds the site or software your after better than any other search engine I've used in the last 6 years!

Ric

106rallye

Is the competition web based? if so you could look into this alternitive.
If the web page host has PHP and mysql on the server you can use that to do it without you having to recieve the emails. I used this recently from a direct input from a form on a web page to a MySQL database and it worked really well. Then the client can access the database without any effort from you! just need to modify the input web page to include a few lines of PHP code
Good luck!

GranTurismo

Hello,

My mail client is Outlook 97 I just did the following.

Try this on about 10 mails before you try th whole lot!

Move the Emails to one folder
Click file
Then Import and Export
PIck Export to another file
Pick the type as CSV or Excel
Pick the folder to export from
Click the Destination drive/dir


It worked very wll for me, but it depends on How structured the mail is.

You may get funny Charactors where there was a return in the text, but that should help you restructure it.

Good luck.

Dave.

Carl Harvey

Many Thanks.

I'll give your suggestions a try.

Mattski. Where can I get hold of Perl (5.x) and MySQL and how much is it likely to cost?

Unfortunately I can't make any changes on the host site.

mattski

Carl,

You will need Perl (5.x) and MySQL of some description. In addition you will need some perl modules so that you can talk to MySQL. These are called DBI and Msql/MySQL modules.

They are available from CPAN. (