From: "Geo" 

"Paul Ranson"  wrote in message
news:41949a4b{at}w3.nls.net...
> How do you parse the data to get it into SQL Server? ISTM that this is the
> crux of your particular application, and unfortunately that's nothing much
> to do with arrays or files.

Actually I believe there is a function in the mail server to use an SQL
server as the log storage instead of using text files. But when I bring it
into excel I just treat space characters as the column separator.

> There's no point in storing the word 'SPAM' thousands of times, rather
> convert 'SPAM', 'NOTSPAM', whatever your possibilities are into numbers.
> Similarly with the time, message numbers, IP addresses etc.
>
> I would use a formal parsing framework for this, especially since that
would
> handle bogus input cleanly.

I don't usually think that way but I guess if memory usage were an issue I
could see a point to doing some sort of conversion.

> What kind of statistics do you want to acquire? A really simple first
> approach would be to simply store each line as a string in a vector, and
> then search your vector for all strings that contain 'SPAM', or all
strings
> that contain 'SPAM' and a particular 'from' address. This would be
> achievable in short order, not neccessarily very elegant or useful, but
> achievable.

hmmm.. I see. So the only downside to that would be that I search the whole
thing instead of just one column, but since C is very fast that might work.
I'll have to think about that one a bit more.

Geo.

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