You have two problems - the first is that the .REP file is sort of like a .ZIP file in that it is just a container for files. The purpose of the code you have asked me about is to unpack the contents of this archive. Each individual record in an ESP+ Storage database is compressed with LZW. In the documentation I make note of a function that you must provide - it is a wrapper around what on a Unix machine would be /usr/bin/uncompress. There is no natural analogue on a Windows machine so you will have to fetch UnxUtils and get uncompress.exe from that.

Now you pick up Randal Schwartz' book Learning Perl on Win32 Systems and find out how to write the wrapper function around your newly acquired uncompress.exe executable.

The last step, maybe... go run the example code. It is sufficient to extract the contents of an ESP Storage database out to a separate disc file per record. You probably still don't have readable text in those files but now you can tackle the next step which is to make sense of whatever format the data is really stored in.

Good luck and let me know how this goes. By the way, is there something happening to the makers of this ESP+ Storage software? I also got an e-mail or two from other people about getting text back from an ESP+ Storage database. It makes a person wonder.

Hi, thanks again. Following your words, I downloaded an uncompress.exe program. In addition, i was reading in detail your prograsms, specially reader.pm, but i can undertand some things. For example, were do you obtain the $COMPRESS_MAGIC_NUMBER, and the others parameters. In the other hand, can you explain me what is the structure of the record .rep file, start char, header lenght or position in the record, data, end of file. Or if you have documentation about that, i wiil appreciate this. I want email to the other person than you know that getting text back from ESP+ Storage repository. Particulary i want to know if they have a solution base on windows. I am thankful to you, if you let me know their emails. I am sorry, my english is not the best, but i hope you can undertand me. Thank you very much

No, I can't give you that person's e-mail address. You've also gotten yourself on a tangent. There is nothing in Reader.pm that you should be looking at if you intend to extract your data. Go read http://search.cpan.org/src/JJORE/ESPPlus-Storage-0.01/eg/read.pl which is an example script for extracting the contents of a .REP file.

If you really want to understand how a .REP file is structured then please learn perl to a sufficient level to understand my source code as provided in Reader.pm. I will not explain its structure separately from that code as there is no need to. I don't think you need to do this to accomplish the extraction goal that you have described to me.