Source Data >255 Fields ?

[David Purdy]

I have a third party data file (500,000 tab-delimited records) and need to
analyse a small number of fields, but there are over 400 fields and those of
interest are between 256 and 400 and so can't be readily imported into
Access 2003 !

Is there an Access 2003 add-in (or perhaps flat-file parser) that will allow
me extract the data for the relevant fields ? TIA.

Dave.

PS The data's also available in SPSS & STATA, but I haven't got access to
the necessary software.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

David

I've seen references to string-parsing languages (sorry, none come to mind
at the moment) that would allow you to "strip off" the first "n" characters
of each record. You might try using an on-line search for that kind of
thing.

Could you treat the data as a single very long string and import it into a
single ?memo field, then run parsing queries to get the pieces of interest?

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP

 

[David Purdy]

Jeff - Many thanks for the suggestions.

I'm going to explore alternative route to Access, using *free*
SPSS-compatible software with a graphical interface, called 'PSPP'
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPP).

The standard installation is complicated (Perl etc.), but there's also a
much simpler Windows installation, running automatically under Cygwin X
Server, download details here (I'm evaluating this file: 5730214407_64.34MB,
running on WinXP Pro):

PSPP-users: Updated version of PSPP for windows setup available 1 Jul 2008
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pspp-users/2008-07/msg00000.html

I need to conduct further tests, but it's readily imported the full contents
of the SPSS equivalent of the tab-separated file that I was struggling
with - which is good, because it contains fuller field details rather than
just cryptic fieldnames & coded response values. PSPP also seemed to
accommodate the tab-separated version, too.

Regards,

Dave.