Re: I would've sworn it was mentioned here

Hugh Watkins wrote:
> Ian Goddard wrote:
>> singhals wrote:
>>> Didn't someone in the past, oh, say, month, mention software that 
>>> would compare databases and flag matches?
>>>
>>> Not necessarily a *specific* genealogy program database, jsut 
>>> databases in general?
>>>
>>> I'm looking for an easy way to vacuum up "hit" lists from Ancestry. 
>>> WC, Google, et al, and find the common ones.
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheryl
>>
>> I don't recall anything like that and a quick google doesn't find 
>> anything.  Wishful thinking?
>>
>> It's an interesting problem.  First of all what's the format of the 
>> hit lists?  Are the hits from all the sources in the same format?

<snip>

> 
> just uplaad the two gedcom to worldconnect and compare the resulting 
> lists  by eyeball
> 
> Hugh W
> 

You've assumed the data will be in Gedcom format.  What if it isn't?

One of my current problems is handling a flat file of baptisms converted 
from PDF by pdftotext (http://linux.die.net/man/1/pdftotext).
 The PDF 
column widths vary slightly from page to page so it's not even a truly 
fixed width file and some of the data isn't even consistently allocated 
between columns.

Parsing the data sources isn't easy and you can't assume that you'll be 
able to find some pre-existing facility to do it for you.

-- 
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers.  Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk