in reply to Re: Parsing e-mail and building HTML
in thread Parsing e-mail and building HTML

I wish I had saved one of todays votes.. (oh well, tomorrow is another day).
In addition to c-era's reply, I would like to add that you could also write a Perl program to read your customers' email messages and put the data into the appropriate text file(s), thus saving you considerable effort each time new data arrives.
This is assuming, of course, that there is a somewhat consistent template or format in which you receive your data.
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RE: RE: Re: Parsing e-mail and building HTML
by rograndom (Initiate) on Jul 05, 2000 at 23:23 UTC
    In addition to c-era's reply, I would like to add that you could also write a Perl program to read your customers' email messages and put the data into the appropriate text file(s), thus saving you considerable effort each time new data arrives.
    This is assuming, of course, that there is a somewhat consistent template or format in which you receive your data.

    Yes, this is also what I would like to do. Could I just read the e-mail then start processing from there with out putting into a textfile first? Another thing that I didn't make clear above was that the two main files (sorted by state & job) are already built, and the new information will be added as a row in a pre-existing table. Perhaps I could post urls of sample pages, and a sample e-mail (which comes from a database, so they're all the same).

    andy j.
[reply]
      I think a better solution is to refer your customers to an online form. This way you can have more control over the number and delimiting of fields, and the incoming data will be much easier to parse. You could use CGI.pm for the form generation and handling.
      The problem with letting your customers send an email (as compared to a form) with the information is that you can't really enforce how the data is formatted, making it difficult to predict reliably.
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