Asking for advice: Using Python for data validation

[juan.alcolea at bt.es]

Hi!

	I need a piece of advice: In a little project where I am currently
working, we must receive and load data from very different sources and very
different geographic locations. The data comes as plain ascii text files,
and we are having a lot of problems with the quality of the data we are
receiving, so a lot of time is wasted trying to load wrong-formatted or
incomplete data, finding out where is the offending data and what the
problem is, asking the remote administrator to correct and resend the files,
etc...

 I'm thinking about using python to code a set of scripts that perform some
data validation (format, completeness) of the files *before* they are sent
to us, so any error is detected as close to the source as possible (and as
far from us as possible ;-) in order to minimize this bad-data time waste.

The questions are:

- Do you think that Python is a good choice for this task? Please note that
the scripts must run in very differente platforms (NT, *nix, maybe Mac...).
I'm fairly new to Python, and although I'm impressed with it, I'm not sure
about it being really and easily portable unless you're a C & OS guru...

- Is there any module or library specially designed for this kind of task?
(parsing text data files with fixed or variable length fields, validating
date formats, etc...)


Big thanks in advance!




Juan Jesús Alcolea Picazo - jjalcolea at inad.es



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