parsing multiple lines of text

[golf pro]

I need to be able to take data that looks like this:

company name: my new company

E-Mail Address: [email protected]

Web Site:

Home Phone: 555-123-9876

and drop it into a field in my FMP database and have a script that parses it into the correct field. The challenge is that not all of the data that I receive is "required". Other things that are challenging are things like company name where the name could be 1 word or 5 words. The one good thing is that all potential fields are each on their own line when I get them.

Thanks for any and all help.

[Vaughan]

The fact that the data in the field is not in a standard format -- some fields are not required -- is what is going to make your task difficult. That they are paragraph separated makes it a bit easier.

If all the e-mail addresses have an "@" character then you can easily put these into e-mail address fields. Similarly if the web sites all start with "http://" then you can look for that string.

I recently cleaned up 48,000 records that had been very badly entered over an 8 year period. I managed to correctly auto-process 95% of the records with scripts.... that left just 2,400 to go through and process manually! And that's what I ended up having to do, go through the remaining 5% and cut-and-paste text to clean up the data.

Which is why you should always charge by the hour for data conversion.

[BobWeaver]

Your data format is almost identical to what I have just finished parsing on another project. Here is a sample file that should work.

Parse.fp5.zip

[golf pro]

I can't thank you enough. This looks like EXACTLY what I need to do.