For example, in the following two lines, only the presence of a part no for the last manufacturer distinguishes them. Doesn't that make the second a duplicate of the first with missing information? Ie. redundant?

Grrr. That's what I was trying to avoid when presenting this data. Remember when I said I'd be trimming off a number of the columns? That's what happened.

A lot of the data is redundant - that's just how it's organized - but not because it's for different vehicles or whatever; it's because whoever put it together didn't use an easier way to say "vendor X's plugs 123,124, and 125 match vendor A's plug 999". Instead, they end up saying

A B C D X 999 001 002 003 123 999 001 002 003 124 999 001 002 003 125

It's dumb, and I know it's one of the things I have to factor out - but I figured that I'd be taking care of lots of redundancy anyway, and this would just get taken care of as part of the parsing process.

My point is, that whilst plugs from different manufacturers may be interchangable for a given vehicle, each manufacturers plugs have different ranges of operating parameters, which means that plugs from two different manufacturers are not interchangable for all applications.

I assure you that this is not the way it works; plugs with different operating parameters get a different part number. The parameter ranges vary widely, but they're standardized - for exactly the reasons you state - and they're comprehensible as data.

I was at an auto parts store two days ago, and had them look up a plug for me - an NGK B7HS-10 - and they pulled up a screen that showed all the equivalents, which exactly matched the list that I had. They never asked me what vehicle I had, and it wouldn't have helped them if they did: it was a Yamaha 15HP outboard motor, and I no auto parts store is going to list that as a vehicle. :)


--
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
-- B. L. Whorf

In reply to Re^4: Organizing and presenting a cross-reference by oko1
in thread Organizing and presenting a cross-reference by oko1

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.