clj-dbase

A small Clojure library designed to parse dBASE files. At the moment only Version 3 is supported.

dBASE file are some sort of legacy table format used by some telecommunication providers to provide billing informations. It consists out of a binary header which starts with some metadata and afterwards the field descriptions. The main part are records in almost plain text. More informations can be found here and here.

Usage

The main entry point is the (parse-dbase-file input-file) function.

(def dbase-data (parse-dbase-file (clojure.java.io/file input-file)))

The returned data is a nested map:

{:header <meta informations>
 :fields <record field definitions>
 :records <the actual table data>}

The header has the following layout:

{:dbf-version <n>
 :last-update <java date>
 :num-records <n>
 :header-length <n in bytes>
 :record-length <n in bytes>}

The field layout is defined as:

{:name <string>
 :type <char>
 :length <byte>
 :precision <byte>
 :work-area-id <byte>
 :flags <byte>}

Additionally, the field definition can be attatched to the record data.

(-> (java.io.file. input-file)
    (parse-dbase-file)
    (field-definition->records))

This results in the field name is also attached to the individual record for easier handling and post-processing.

License

A small clojure library for parsing dBASE files. Copyright © 2020 Henrik Jürges juerges.henrik@gmail.com

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.