{"id":38,"date":"2006-08-19T10:32:11","date_gmt":"2006-08-19T14:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lowtek.ca\/list\/?p=38"},"modified":"2008-02-07T11:41:23","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T15:41:23","slug":"converting-csv-data-for-use-with-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"Converting .csv data for use with List"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question: <\/strong>I am trying to create a database from a .csv  file, how do I do this?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Answer:<\/strong>  There is a program called listdb.exe which is part of the download  for List.  It is a DOS program that can convert .csv format files into  List format .pdb files.<\/p>\n<p>Its not terribly user friendly, and there isn&#8217;t really any good  documentation.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>From the Start menu on windows &#8211; select Run, use this to execute the  &#8216;cmd&#8217; program.<\/li>\n<li>Navigate to the folder where you have the listdb.exe program using the  &#8216;cd&#8217; command.<\/li>\n<li>If you run listdb on its own, you&#8217;ll see some mini-help:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>\nC:\\Documents and Settings\\Andrew Low\\My Documents\\list><strong>listdb.exe <\/strong><br \/>\nVersion 0.97a<br \/>\nUsage: listdb.exe -[p|c|x]<br \/>\n-p => create private (non-beamable) database<br \/>\n-c => create database<br \/>\n-x => extract database\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>At this point &#8211; if you are totally lost &#8211; you&#8217;ll need to find some help.  Hopefully someone can give you a hand wrangling a DOS program.<br \/>\nThe .csv format needs to have some special formatting in it (mostly the  first line).  Let&#8217;s look at an example .csv file to get an idea of what is involved here.<\/p>\n<p>C:\\Documents and Settings\\Andrew Low\\My Documents\\list><strong>type cd_list.csv<\/strong><br \/>\nCD List,Artist,Title,Home,Work,Car,,,,,,,,,,,,<br \/>\nHome,Download,Furnace,A breakthrough album<br \/>\nHome,Skinny Puppy,Too Dark Park,Classic puppy album<br \/>\nHome,Skinny Puppy,Inquisition,Single remixes<br \/>\nBasically its:<br \/>\nDatabase Name,Field 1 Name,Field 2 Name,Category1,Category2,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Then all other rows are:<br \/>\nCategory,Field 1 Text,Field 2 Text,Note Text<\/p>\n<p>Extra commas in the note field, are converted into carriage returns.<br \/>\nHint: If you use the -x (extract) flag to take apart an existing database, it will dump things in the correct format giving you a template of sorts to work from.<!--4c207e2c65075f5f8cabed4a1636937c--><!--1225f7065d5101f603d6b720e38be0ac--><!--9fc245438ae27c7490a8d09353eefa1d--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question: I am trying to create a database from a .csv file, how do I do this? Answer: There is a program called listdb.exe which is part of the download for List. It is a DOS program that can convert .csv format files into List format .pdb files. Its not terribly user friendly, and there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/list\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}