Artisanal software sale

Posted by Andy Brice
Jun 26, 2021 at 12:49 PM

>I just saw the video for Easy Data Transform - impressive!

Thanks. The video is of a rather old version. I need to re-do it.

>Our local property tax district is out of control. I asked for a copy of
>the tax roll and got a text file containing a single line of 336 million
>characters. Deliberately, I’m sure, no explanation of the data format
>was given.

That is pretty inexcusable.

“All professions are conspiracies against the laity” (George Bernard-Shaw)

>
>Some research in their budget revealed a software vendor which led to
>documentation of the file format. I’m sure they intended me to not make
>sense out of what they sent. Python is my friend, and I wrote a class
>that parses the data, which is about five data structures intermingled.
> >Curiously, there are totals records in the file which are wildly wrong.
>I’m very curious what else I can find.
> >Rather than spend a lot of time coding, I’m going to see what Easy Data
>Transform will do, either with the raw fixed length records or with
>excerpts I can write from the file in CSV or Excel format.

You can often combine transforms together to do things that aren’t immediately obvious. Just ask on https://forum.easydatatransform.com/ if you get stuck on anything.

Andy Brice