Re: Problem converting Informix file

On Thu, 30 Oct 1997, Obrag Aterg wrote: > I was recently laden with the responsibility of solving the following > problem: Bad luck. > My organisation has a database system based on Informix 3.x (don't ask > me why its that old). Informix 3.30 was the last version of the Informix pre-SQL database product. It dates back to 1986. There were earlier versions, too. > Most of the files (with .DAT extension) opened OK in MS Excel, Probably because (a) most of the data was character data and (b) there were few deleted records. Each record is delimited with either a newline (useful) or an ASCII NUL '\\0' (can be painful). Character data is stored normally, except that there are usually no delimiters between fields. > but one file has a lot of odd characters (eg. square box that when copy > onto the clipboard translates into nothing, so it is difficult to do > replace). This file probably contains numeric data -- either integers or floats (or, possibly, dates). You really need to go back to the database and unload the data. Do you still have the ".dbd" file? Do you still have Informix 3.30 on your machine? If so, I have a toolset which will probably be able to unload your data and convert it to SQL, etc. If you don't (still have 3.30), life gets much more difficult. Yours, Jonathan Leffler (johnl@informix.com) #include <witticism.h>