dBASE Reader and Converter / News: Recent posts

Today I decided to give up this project as it is more than eleven years old and is no longer maintained.

If you are interested in the source code, you find the latest version 0.9.0 on Github:
https://github.com/bergsysteme

Berlios decided to close down its service and so we are back on Sourceforge. Latest file releases are moved back to Sourceforge.

Latest sources are hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/bergsysteme.

CVS will not be synced.

I am hosting the dbf project from now on Berlios. So please check out the new home for the project summary and the website.

Project Summary: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/dbf
Website: http://www.anubisnet.de or http://dbfnet.de.vu

Today we published dbf as version 0.8.1 which is mainly a bugfix release. Version 0.8.1 contains improvements in the CSV conversion and a minor update in the file handling.

More information on http://dbf.sf.net or on http://sf.net/projects/dbf

If you have downloaded dbf 0.8 we recommend you to downgrade to 0.7 or wait until version 0.8.1 is released. We have encountered several bugs in the dBASE file handling and the CSV export. Older versions are not affected by this bug.

dbf 0.8 is a converter for dBASE, FoxBase, FoxPro and Clipper. The new release comes with several small new features and some bugfixes:

- Changed the options parsing system and the options id, so that options
with a single hyphen can also be used and displayed in the help.
- Inserted a fail safe routine which checks that the original file will
never be overwritten if the options filename is missing
- Tab-separated files without quoted text-passages can be created by using
't' as separator.
- Fix for date strings in SQL: According the PostgreSQL manual, SQL (ANSI) requires
date strings to be quoted, ie. '20031029'
send in by Tommi Rintala, t2r@wasalab.com
- Can differentiate between dBASE, FoxPro, FoxBase and Clipper
- --view-info reports the database type and version number
- supports datatypes int, float, double and logical in SQL and CSV
- introduced cast operations for CSV and SQL export
- differentiates between deleted and existent data sets

Today we have released two additional binary releases for Alpha-Processors and MacOS X. You can get them from the Files section.

The CVS tree was officially approved for the next major release on 24th September 2003. Version 0.8 will feature support for memo fields and the possible way to use dbf as library in other programmes. For more information, visit http://anubisnet.sf.net/products/dbf/cvsversion.html

This is the best release ever, we have fixed a lot of bugs and programmed dbf to keep to the standards for CSV and SQL. It gives now full control to the user and works stable on a lot of platforms. The complete CHANGELOG reads like this:

- Totally reworked options parsing.
- We added the way to specify the desired CSV separator,
debug level, and string-trimming option (below).
- When outputing the SQL file, strings, probably, should not be trimmed, and that is now a default. The trimming can now be specified as:
--trim {r|l|b}
- The two codepage-conversion functions combined into one, which is also made table-driven.
- Record-conversion can now be turned off with the --noconv option.
- Some reorganization in the variable-declaration and other cleanups...

If you need help for dbf, subscribe to the appropriate mailinglist or visit http://forum.anubisnet.de.

The current release features full sql support, that means dbf creates a sql instruction set out of a dBASE files which you can use with every SQL-compliant client to add your data to other database systems.
A lot of fixes were done in this version, so was the multi-platform support improved, new Makefiles for Windows and Linux were generated and several compiler warnings were erased.
More information about the new version you may find in the documents INSTALL, README and FAQ in the different packages.

dbf - dBASE Reader and Converter has reached a new major version number. This release has the following changes since 0.4:

- Support for Big Endian systems (PPC): stable
- improvements in endian.h
* dbf.c:
- Removed free() calls on static buffers. char buffer[565656];
- Caught return from csv_open in csvhandle.
- initialised export_filename to NULL to ensure later calls like if(export_filename)
succeed correctly.
* iodbf.h:
- Made csv_open return the handle that it generates instead of 1.
- minor/major bugfixes
- and all changes made in the beta versions
- Override flag for Big Endian systems implemented. Use --ppc to disable the system check
- Fixes in the help
- minor feature enhancements and improved error detection
- Fixes in codepages
- Fixes for displaying the date (showing it now in normal english syntax)
- Fixed output for table structure
- Wall-flag for gcc added in Makefile
- major code clean-up

This release brings support for Big Endian systems, code fixes in the codepages, and a fix to show the date properly. A new table structure output based on MySQL was added, and some major code-cleanup was done.

About dbf:
dbf is an easy-to-use command line tool to show and convert the content of dBASE III, IV, and 5.0 files. It reads dBASE databases and prints the content to the screen or converts it to comma-separated (*.csv) files which can be opened in Excel, StarOffice, and most other spread sheets. It can also be used to show some statistics about the content.

Welcome to dbf's new home. dbf is a small leightweight converter for dBASE files. It is very easy to handle and available for most of the platforms used today. After the more or less successful start and because of the ongoing growth and demand of dbf I decided to open a new home for dbf with the idea in my mind that others will join the project to bring in their ideas or suggestions and their knowledge of programming to make dbf even better.
So, here it is: dbf's new home...