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I'm looking into what it would take to create a game viewer to read SGF game records for games like Chess and Go. The game records have seem pretty simple by human standards, but parsing it is a bit more complicated. Here's an example:

(;PW[roswell1329]PB[chochikun];B[ea];w[ac];B[qq]C[Interesting move here...](;B[qs]C[Better?]);W[tt])

Does anyone know how I would approach this sort of task in DBPro? Would I need to read in the string character by character and keep track of the number of open and closed brackets and parentheses, or is there a higher method of parsing through a string?

our plugin has some nifty vb.net string functions including Split and Mid, that may help you in your endeavour

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edit: based on your example, would splitting on the semicolon be helpful? If yes then definitely get our plugin

check the code base for my string tokenizer. IMO, that looks like a sloppy way of writing data.

It's not really a sloppy way of coding, it's just a system that has grown over time. It looks like there is some movement toward an XML based method which would be a much more modern way of storing the information, but XML isn't any easier to parse in BASIC than the EBNF standard that SGF files use now. EBNF is just an older markup language.

As for the semi-colons, yes that would work just fine, but there are some other conditions. Breaking up the string on semi-colons would seperate out each move, but then you have to break up each move into property types, of which there may be several per move. It sounds like your plugin might work, CattleRustler. However, if you coded it in VB, did you use a function that reads the string in character by character, or did you build yourself some pattern-matching functions?

the plugin is written in VB.NET. Some of the functions are just wrapped vb.net functions, some are, at the core, a vb.net function, but with some added code to help it along to be able to play nice with DBP. If you click my logo below the page you come to has a link pointing to the user document. Look through the string functions as everything is fully documented. Maybe something will make your life easier there but I suspect you will need to write your own parser - hopefully our plugin can help in that effort as it employs many powerful string functions from vb.net (above and beyond anything found in vb6). If you want to recommend something to us (like a parser of some sort) then feel free to explain and maybe we can add it. On the XML note, I remember writing a class in VB6 that parsed xml, and it was nothing more than cleverly used vb6 commands (INSTR, MID,LEFT RIGHT, INSTRREV, etc) all of which are found in our plugin. .net has XML classes (including parsers, stream readers) so that may be something we could add to our plugin.