Hi all,
I’m writing a slightly bigger script than i normally attempt and would appreciate advice on the best route to take.
I’ve been using a PC app for many years (as there wasn’t a Mac version of it) and recently someone launched an app with similar features for Mac, that is also AppleScript-able. I’m writing a script that takes a data file from the PC app and generates the equivalent within the Mac app. I’ve worked out the latter half of the script and I’m now working on the section that analyses the PC programs’s data file. I’ve largely worked out the data structure and what hex codes map to various properties of the program. The data seems to be delimited by 00 00 00, and there is an awful lot of it (ie data files tend to be >200Kb) in quite a complex arrangement.
So i have to write a routine to parse this data into something meaningful for the rest of my applescript and i have a few questions:
What is the best approach to read and parse the data given the large data sizes? This is what I’ve considered so far and would appreciate feedback from anyone who has been down this road already!
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Breaking the data down into small lists:
First break up the data into 2 digit chunks (47726F7500000047 → 47,72,6F,75,00,00,00,47)
Set the TID to “00,00,00” to break up the data into lists (“47,72,6F,75”,“47”)
Parse the lists using a lookup table to generate meaning
I think my raw data is just too big to read into a list in the first place though - what is an alternate way to do this? -
Using Database Events to create a Database with multiple fields seems a good way to handle the large amount of data, but then what is the best way to read in the data to it?
regards,
g