Artisanal software sale

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 25, 2021 at 10:50 PM

I just saw the video for Easy Data Transform - impressive!

Our local property tax district is out of control. I asked for a copy of the tax roll and got a text file containing a single line of 336 million characters. Deliberately, I’m sure, no explanation of the data format was given.

Some research in their budget revealed a software vendor which led to documentation of the file format. I’m sure they intended me to not make sense out of what they sent. Python is my friend, and I wrote a class that parses the data, which is about five data structures intermingled.

Curiously, there are totals records in the file which are wildly wrong. I’m very curious what else I can find.

Rather than spend a lot of time coding, I’m going to see what Easy Data Transform will do, either with the raw fixed length records or with excerpts I can write from the file in CSV or Excel format.

Andy Brice wrote:

>My own Hyper Plan and Easy Data Transform software are on sale at 25%
>off. Other CRIMPing favourites such as Tinderbox, Scrivener and
>Devonthink are also on sale.
> >Note that some of the software is Mac only.