[REBOL] Re: Not-too-smart Table Parser (was: how to handle tables?)
From: meekerdb:rain at: 23-Sep-2001 0:37
On 23-Sep-01, Gregg Irwin wrote:
> Hi Joel,
>
> OK, it's a quick hack and fatally flawed in at least one respect, but
> please take a look at it and let me know what you think.
>
> --Gregg
>
> REBOL [
>
> notes: {
> Joel Neely:
>
> OTOH, if you really want to be consistent with the philosophy
> of letting the human type for human consumption and requiring
> the formatting program to figure out what was meant, I'd love
> to see some code that can handle the following (exactly as it
> appears below, of course). Back in the day, I spent quite a
> bit of time trying to come up with a bit of AI that could take
> a flat file or printout image such as the following and infer
> where the columns were intended, whether each column was to be
> left-justfied, right-justified, or centered, and what type of
> data should appear in each. It's non-trivial IMHO, but YMMV.
>
> Emp# First Name Last Name Nickname Pager Nr Phone Number
> ==== ========== =========== ======== ======== > 12 Johannes Doe
Jake 888-1001 555-1212
> 3456 Ferdinando Quattlebaum Ferdy 800-555-1214
> 234 Betty Sue Doaks 555-1213
> 4567 Sue Ellen Van Der Lin 888-1002 888-555-1215
>
> Assume no leading space or trim all leading space
>
> Iterate over the first row
> if you hit a space
> drop down through that column
> if you hit a non-space
> not a column delimiter
> if you get to the bottom, and it's all spaces
> it's *probably* a column delimiter
> mark column
>
> You could do the same kind of thing for proportional fonts
> using pixel offsets in place of character offsets.
I'm no Rebol programmer and I don't know an 'AI' solution, but when I
work with tables like this I read the table header line(s) first and
then parse by position according to the column headings - which is
pretty close to how people do it. Notice in your example above I've
inserted a few additional "=" so as to make the headings unambiguous.
Then they can be used to parse the lines of the table.
Brent Meeker
There are two ways to write error-free programs.
Only the third one works.
