textbase - A Python library to manipulate Inmagic/DBText style data files

What are textbase files?

A simple format separating data records with a single character delimiter, (all files we use have a $ character on a line. For each record the fieldname is the first word on the line, usually in upper case. Any text following the fieldname is that value for the field. Repeating values in a list for the fieldname can be specified on consecutive lines using a semicolon. If the text value for a field is very long and needs to wrap, start the line with one (or more) spaces.

Why did you re-invent the wheel?

We already have CSV files, or JSON files, or YAML, why did you make this? Well, I didn't invent this. It is actually a format used by a suite of software from InMagic: http://www.inmagic.com/products/dbtext-library-suite/

We used the dbText software to create a boatload of data files since the early eighties, which is a LONG time ago in Internet-land. Those exact same data files are still used to drive a lot of software, and has proven to be remarkably useful over the years. Think of it as Markdown vs HTML, or as a simpler dataformat with über-simple Key:Value records that are human readable.

Example File:

FOO A Foo field
BAR A Baz field with mulitple entries
; Another
; and yet even more
$
FOO This is the FOO field for the next record
BAR Nothing

The main utitlity class is TextBase. It can be initialised with an open file, or a string buffer, named sourcefile. Sourcefile is iterated over, splitting the contents into chunks. Each chunk is parsed and added to an internal buffer list. The internal buffer contains a dict for each record. Each entry in the dict is keyed on the DBText record fieldname, the entry itself is a list of the values.

The TextBase object can be used as a generator to iterate over the contents, or the Textbase object can be index-addressed like a list.

Example Usage:

import textbase
t = textbase.TextBase(somebuf)

print len(t)

for x in t[10:20]:
    print x.keys()

print t[0]

If you do not want the records parsed into Python dictionaries and just want to muck about with the records as text blobs, initialise like this:

t = textbase.TextBase(somebuf, parse=False)

Author: Etienne Posthumus Mail: [email protected]