Legacy data parsing

[Terry Hancock]

On Friday 08 July 2005 01:31 pm, gov wrote:
> Where I work, we receive large quantities of data which is currently
> all printed on large, obsolete, dot matrix printers.  This is a problem
> because the replacement parts will not be available for much longer.
> 
> So I'm trying to create a program which will capture the fixed width
> text file data and convert as well as sort the data (there are several
> different report types) into a different format which would allow it to
> be printed normally, or viewed on a computer.

If this is really your reason for wanting to do this, it seems like your
solutions is overkill.  If you really just want the data to get
reformatted for printing on a modern printer, it would be trivial to
do this with a text-formatter like "enscript" (see, e.g.: 
http://people.ssh.com/mtr/genscript/ ) which produces Postscript
output from ASCII text. 

On a typical Linux system, this sort of tool is usually part of your
printer installation, after which it runs more or less invisibly.

OTOH, if the *real* reason is that you don't like the look of the
dot matrix output and you want it *rearranged* and reformatted
for aesthetic reasons, then you might reasonably want to use
Python to do that as you suggest.


--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com