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From: frech@mwraaa.army.mil (Norman R. Frech CPLS)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: dbaseiii structure
Message-ID: <1990Jun1.182515.16801@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 1 Jun 90 18:25:15 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: frech@mwraaa.army.mil
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 19

I am attempting to read the structure of an empty dbaseiii file and
extract just the field names.  I am using the following perl script
which almost works.  Some of the fields end up with an extra character
at the end and those which begin with a "F" are split and the "F" is
dropped.  It also gives extraneous characters at the beginning and drops
characters at the end. If anyone has any suggestions I am all ears.

$/ = "F\245F";
$\ = "\n";
while (<>)
{
chop;
s/\W//g;
$len = length;
$_ = substr($_,0,$len - 1);
print;
}
 
Norm Frech ( frech@mwraaa.army.mil )