Is it possible to take information from an email and have it parsed and put into a database?

[Jschmuck2]

Let's say, in theory, that every day you received emails (in the neighborhood of 3 or 400) with lists of people on them who had to be somewhere.

Would it be in the realm of possibility to write a script that parses that information (name, time, location, etc...) and place it into a database? Currently, the people who are doing this are using filemaker 5 :disgust: and printing out the email and then putting the information into filemaker manually. A lot.

 

[James Bond]

Originally posted by: Jschmuck2
Let's say, in theory, that every day you received emails (in the neighborhood of 3 or 400) with lists of people on them who had to be somewhere.

Would it be in the realm of possibility to write a script that parses that information (name, time, location, etc...) and place it into a database? Currently, the people who are doing this are using filemaker 5 :disgust: and printing out the email and then putting the information into filemaker manually. A lot.

It would be possible, yeah, but it would take some work. The emails would need to all be standardized and follow the same format as well, I think.

 

[Jschmuck2]

They do, for the most part, follow the same format.

 

[Crusty]

Ruby on Rails applications can process emails the same way you can handle any other request.... but this is the wrong forum.

 

[erub]

I wrote one going the other way (from excel to outlook). Then again, it would depend on the database how much work it would be.

 

[Red Squirrel]

For iceteks.com all the news clips are emails sent in like 1000's of different formats which go through a parser then are sent to a pending queue, so it's doable. Lot of them get miss parsed though. If the emails in your case are more consistant it's easier. You'll want to use something like procmail to pass it to a custom application.