I have a machine (PLC) that is dumping its test results into a fixed- length text file.
While it has nothing to do with python, I found that creating a MySQL table with the proper fixed length char() fields and using 'load data infile' was the easiest way to deal with that sort of scenario. The python script is the secondary part, that handles the normalization and proper typing of the first table to the second, permanent storage area. But in this case, the more advanced bits are the database and SQL details, and python is just a very convenient way to build the SQL statements and execute them. I'm really not sure what the best way to deal with fixed length data is in python. I might define a list with the field lengths and use a string slicing to get the items.. as a first thought: myfile = '/somewhere/somefile.txt' sizes = [16,4,8,8,8] fd = open(myfile,r) for line in fd.readlines() : idx1 = 0 for l in sizes : -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list