.BEGIN-HECNET-INFO ADDR |NAME |OWNER |EMAIL |HARDWARE |OS |LOCATION |NOTES 8.401|CHIMPY|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |AlphaServer DS10 |OpenVMS 8.3 |London, England |Main SAMPSACOM system, SMTP gateway (CHIMPYMAIL.COM) 8.400|GORVAX|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |SIMH VAX on OSX/Intel |OpenVMS 7.3 |London, England |MULTINET bridge to Area 2, Area router 8.403|RHESUS|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |HP rx2600 Dual 900MHz |OpenVMS 8.4E |London, England |File libraries available 8.500|PYFFLE|Sampsa Laine |system at pyffle.com|VMWare |Pyffle BBS |London, England |Waffle reimplementation BBS, log in as pyffle for access .END-HECNET-INFO I can obviously see several potential issues here. First of all, I'll have to make an assumption about that the first line after the .BEGIN... is a header line to be ignored. Second, I'll have to assume that the same fields exist, in the same order, always. The other alternative is to actually parse the first line, and hope that the column titles in the first line have been standardized fully, and then match columns to find what I'm looking for after that. Third, things like the style of hardware, os and location fields are totally free at this point, which goes against my wish for something a bit uniform. (What kind of OS is "Pyffle BBS" for example?) I'm sure that if I were to write something to scrape the stuff, I bet there might turn up other issues as well over time. Yes, I'm a grumpy fart. :-) Johnny On 18 May 2013, at 23:10, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote: Always doable, just pick one box per area. As for easy to scrape, we had a pretty well-defined format for where the machine readable stuff starts (the content is just CSV, more or less) and ends. How much easier do you want it? :) sampsa On 18 May 2013, at 23:08, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: On 2013-05-18 22:58, Sampsa Laine wrote: On 18 May 2013, at 18:41, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Or I could possible scrape files in know locations to manage the updating, if that would make more sense. (The last one would probably be really easy from my point of view...) Johnny Didn't we develop a format for this ages ago, to be stuck at the end of INFO.TXT on the public accessible dir of a machine? I don't think the current INFO.TXT files are that useful, or even easy to scrape. But that might just be me. :-) Not to mention that I have no clue which machines to scrape, if I were to do that. If I were to do it, I'd probably ask for a different format, and have a designated machine per person/area to scrape. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol