database question

[Kevin D. Clark]

Vince McHugh writes:

>   I am supplying them with scanning equipment that can
> produce a pdf file with "meta data" in the file name.
> It will look something like this:
> 
>  info1_info2_info3_info4_info5.pdf
> 
> The info1 - info5 will be replaced by specific meta
> data with information about the PDF file. 
> 
>    Now the question, We would like to know if there is
> a way to write a script that would strip out the info
> fields separated by underscores (this separator could
> be changed to any valid character) and populate
> database fields, possibly using MySQL.

Sure, this would be easy.  I would highly recomend using Perl and
Perl's DBI modules for this.

In your particular case, a snippet of Perl code like this might be
useful:

  use strict;    # turn on handy warnings

  my $filename;

  $filename = "aaa_bbb_CCC_ddd_eee.pdf";
  my($info1, $info2, $info3, $info4, $info5) =
    $filename =~ m{([a-zA-Z]*)_
                   ([a-zA-Z]*)_
                   ([a-zA-Z]*)_
                   ([a-zA-Z]*)_
                   ([a-zA-Z]*).pdf}x;

Now you'd got info1 - info5 -- putting this into a DB is a matter of
programming.  If I am hand-waving here, this is because this task is
highly dependent on how your DB is setup.  There's plenty of
documentation available for this task.

>  The second thing that we would like the script to do
> is to move the file from one folder to another
> possibly based one one of the info fields name. For
> instance if the info1 field is a customers name or
> number that the file would be moved to a folder with
> that name.

Depending on what you need to do, the following Perl code might
suffice:

  rename($filename, $info1) 
    || die "Couldn't rename $filename to $info1: $!\n";

Regards,

--kevin
-- 
Kevin D. Clark / Cetacean Networks / Portsmouth, N.H. (USA)
cetaceannetworks.com!kclark (GnuPG ID: B280F24E)
alumni.unh.edu!kdc