in reply to Acknowledgement of Contributions

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Re^2: Acknowlededment of Contributions
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Mar 03, 2015 at 18:50 UTC
    "What's a 911?"

    Don't you know? It's a car!

    I wish i get one from my daughter some day.

    «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

      That would be great, but will have to wait for $newwork to payoff $studentloans!

      James

      There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...

        Let's wait until $payday. Currently $income==0

        Karl

        «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

      That's one heckuva a daughter. Giving a Porsche to her father.

Re^2: Acknowlededment of Contributions
by SuicideJunkie (Vicar) on Mar 03, 2015 at 15:21 UTC

    I'm guessing 411 (Info) would be more the thing, but it could be a different number depending on the country/region.

    Sets of regexes are good for matching the various formats and unmangling them into a common form. Importing the mess to a DB (one table, with one field?) and then coming up with SQL statements to do the same thing sounds like a lot more work.

      Databases tend to support (limited) regex these days. So, perl is better, but databases are not out of the picture.

      Anyway, the OP says:

      • the data comes from power plants
      • the identifiers are not the same
      • she loaded the data into a spreadsheet

      All this points to many tables (one per plant) with fields (spreadsheet), at the very least, id in one and the rest in another. Matching those ids to each other can be done either through a manual list, or other provided information such as by matching addresses. This can be very easy for a database to do. He should use the best tool for the situation. Perl is the best tool when it comes to text manipulation, any in many, many other cases. Though, a database might be better in this particular case.

Re^2: Acknowlededment of Contributions
by jmlynesjr (Deacon) on Mar 03, 2015 at 15:57 UTC

    911 is the emergency phone number in the US. Guess I could have said something more internationally generic like HELP!

    James

    There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...

      I figured from context what you meant. But he sentence it just plain odd: "I got a 911 from my daughter." :)

      Regardless, have you thought of using a database?

        I agree. US English local dialects can be odd. I speak Southern yall.

        A database would be a better long term approach, but her time frame didn't match my database learning curve, so brute force won out.

        James

        There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...