[thelist] converting emails to database

[Glen Burnett]

>Another solution is to have the email sent a script directly, but the
question I have is why can't you change the form to write to a database
instead?
Scott

Perhaps this is what is being done now but there are 700 historic
reservations that have to be imported into the new DB?

If so, then the only way may be to find a Developer to write a script for
you that will parse the email bodies, whether by accessing them from Outlook
or post processing them after they have been exported into the DB?

If each email is laid out in exactly the same way the Developer could write
a script which looks for tabs, carriage returns, keywords etc.  Or, if the
emails are in HTML, then by searching for specific HTML tags?

Quite tricky and the data would have to be reviewed afterwards to ensure
every reservation transferred properly but not impossible.

I did this once before when a whole lot of data was given to me in a text
file and managed to do it by looking for two blank lines which delimited
each record then just counted down lines from the start of each new record
and split each line into an Array at each tab or after a certain number of
blank spaces.

99% of the data came through fine using this method.

Glen