I'm writing a program that will parse a log file and write data to a MySQL database based on the content of the log file.

The script will run via cron and I want to make sure I skip lines that have been parsed before.

One idea I had was to base 64 encode the line and make this a unique key in the database. Then the next time the script runs, if there is a matching key, skip the line.

What I don't like about this is that the encoded line is quite a long string, which would make viewing the database difficult to read. Is there a way to encode a long string to a relatively short string string?

Or perhaps there is a better way to do this?

In reply to Trying to identify unique lines in a log file by aditya1977

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