ASCII databases

[pschoonveld]

Has anyone ever used any good modules for ASCII delimited databases? I have seen a couple kicking around, but it seems to me that there was a really good module for this I saw a while back. Thanks.

[Anonymous Monk]

I strongly recommend Shishir Gundavaram's sprite.pm. It gets a bit clunky if you've got more than a few hundred records (as you'd expect), but since it uses SQL-like syntax it shouldn't involve too much pain to upgrade to a proper RDBMS at a later date. You can also use regular expressions as search criteria.

[btrott]

Check out DBD::CSV. It's a DBI database driver that lets you use comma-separated text files as if they were databases.

[XTaran]

Yepp, Using DBI with DBD::CSV is fine for that job (and it does allow to use other delimiters than comma, too. I prefer "|" :-), but unfortunately it still lacks of joining data from several files/tables. That means "SELECT * FROM table1,table2;" doesn't work yet. :-/

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[Anonymous Monk]

The Perl Cookbook by O'Reilly shows two ways to do this. The module to use is: use Text::ParseWords;

[Anonymous Monk]

i'd advise a DBI module for later migration options ;-)