> 8/23\QRS 2304\Haitian Blues\L. Miles & Sp. Williams\CC-244, BT-137046\

As a full time database analyst / programmer, this post caught me.  What's
funny is that I was very recently seriously thinking of _finally_ getting
all my rolls on a database, but have always felt that I didn't quite have
enough to bother with, about 300 or so.

But I must say that the most common sort of plain text data that I import
to a database is delimited with a comma, the character and date data is
surrounded with quotes, and numeric data is plain, so your above example
would look like this: "8/23", "QRS 2304", "Haitian Blues", "L. Miles &
Sp. Williams", "CC-244, BT-137046".  Note that the imbedded comma behind
CC-244 would not cause a problem, because it is surrounded by quotes.
I would probably separate the name and the roll number, but make it
character data as well, i.e., "8/23","QRS", "2304", etc.

Love those extra fields!  How are you storing this data?  Spread sheet,
data base manager?  Which ones?

>I would like to trade this type of data with others. Anyone interested?

Yes, I would.  It gives me a reason to get them in the system.  Besides,
I was looking for "Auld Lang Syne" several days ago, on a moments notice,
and couldn't find it!  (I had a year to find it, so you'd think I'd plan
ahead a bit, huh?)

Rick Pargeter

 [ You'd better set aside "White Christmas" right now!  ;-)