Have the new file formats for ratings and uploading results been finalized yet. I know that the most popular paring software use the dBase format for files but that is obsolete.
There was talk of ASCII tab delimited or csv or … formats. I don’t use Windows so the more open the format the better.
Steve
The formats have not been finalized yet, I’m hoping to have that done before the annual list is generated in early November. I don’t know how quickly the pairing program authors will be able to handle the new formats for the ratings supplements or be able to prepare the new formats for uploading membership or crosstable data. (I spent a good part of today dealing with the current .DBF files in order to get October Supplement files that will work with both WinTD and Swiss-Sys. There will also be a new Gold Master file to match this supplement.)
While I will agree that the dBase format is a tad dated, it is far from obsolete. PHP and Perl both contain modules to support reading and writing these files, and I’m sure other languages do as well.
I would lean towards tab-delimited over CSV, the former being a bit easier to parse. XML carries a lot of overhead burden with it, whether that overhead is worth it is not an easy question to answer.
For that matter, a stick-shift approach works too, once you have figured out how dBase files are constructed. You can even use DOS-based GW-BASIC or Microsoft QuickC.
Simplicity-wise, it doesn’t really matter much what the delimiter is, except that if it is a comma, you have to worry about values (such as names) that may contain internal commas, and work around this problem by enclosing such values in quotation marks.
Bill Smythe
Parsing a CSV file can get a little complicated when the contents of a field includes both commas and quote marks.
Commas and quote marks are possible in name or address fields for a tournament or a USCF membership, a tab is not. That makes the tab character a non-ambiguous delimiter.