Hi, I'm kind of new to all this and was hoping someone could help me. I've been designing websites for a few years now, they've not been overly complicated and mainly for myself and my friends (I did it as a real job for a bit, but didn't get paid enough) Anyway, now my husbands best mate has asked me to help him design a website for business (basically he'll throw the money in and I'll do the hard work), but we will share any profits. The website will be selling books. It sounded quite simple, I've used OSCommerce in the past for basic shop needs and I was looking around and have decided to use Zen-Cart for this one. Anyway I can do all the bits and bobs to get that working, thats not a problem. My husbands mate wanted me to look into getting a book dropshipper, which we did, and its taken nearly 2 months but we now have an account - they are basically a wholesaler that will dropship the books for us. The problem is we've been asking since we contacted them, what format their data came in. I was hoping it was going to be access or excel, or something like that. No, its .txt. My HUGE problem, is what do I do with the data. I need to get it into some format so I can upload it into MySQL on the server. However I'm stumped, I can't seem to do anything with it. They have 470,000 books available in stock and over 2,000,000 on special delivery, I think I may be here for the rest of my life should I have to input them individually. I have tried to inport into Access, but it doesn't do what I want. Below is some example data: ** IB 1859060196 BI PAPERBACK AU SHINE, NORMAN BC VXFN CO UK PD 19990923 NP 128 RP 9.99 RI 9.99 RE 9.99 PU CONNECTIONS BOOK PUBLISHING YP 1999 TI NUMEROLOGY TI YOUR CHARACTER AND FUTURE REVEALED IN NUMBERS EA 9781859060193 RF R SG 2 GC M01 DE A unique step-by-step visual approach to numerology, how to assess DE characters and compatibility from names and birth dates. ** IB 1898295395 BI SPIRAL BOUND AU PRICE, ROBIN BC ELX CO UK PD 19961231 RP 15.75 RI 15.75 RE 15.75 PU ENGLISH EXPERIENCE YP 1996 SR BRAIN FRIENDLY RESOURCES TI CONVERSATION 2: STUDENT TALK EA 9781898295396 RF R GC C01 **[/SIZE] Between the ** is each books data. When I import into Access it takes the info as it is. But what I would like is to have the 2 letters at the start of each line as the colum headers, e.g. AU means Author, so people can search by author etc. But at the mo, when it get's imported it looks just like it is in the text file, which I can really do anything with. If anyone has any ideas, or has a book website, I would be very greatful for your help, as I'm really stuck on this one. Thanks for your help Best Wishes Laura
If you can upload this text file to your website you can then use the fopen function in php to parse the file line by line. the function then would put the value of each line into the the correct field in your database based on what the first 2 characters are on that line. http://uk.php.net/fopen Hope this helps.
I can write a php script which will parse the txt file and upload the contents to a Mysql database. Cost $75. PM me if you are interested.
I agree with Dave and daniah, you need a script to work with that amount of data. $75 or 10 days copy and pasting, I know which I would go with.
oh well I meant upload the txt file and load the contents to a Mysql database...if that makes you happy