Subject: From: Date:

RE: RE: RE: RE: [ECS] MS Outlook and ECS Terry, Martin G Mr SAIC Wed, 6 Dec 2000 10:09:09 -0600

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 Wed, 6 Dec 2000 10:09:09 -0600 
Would it be faster to spawn a "grep" on the text file, spitting out the
match to a single line text file? Like this:

CID item provides xxx-xxxx
create text item "grep xxxx-xxxx phone numbers.txt > match.txt"
Run the text item
Chop off the xxx-xxxxx part of match.txt (sed works great)
Speak @match.txt


I use ecs to spawn DOS versions of "grep" and "sed" all the time.

"grep" is just the unix version of "find". Very powerful. There are various
dos versions around.

"sed" is a DOS version of UNIX's "serial editor". It works sort of like
Mark's ED.EXE macro language, and it's
just as cryptic - so you really feel like a man when you get it to work. :) 

SED is VERY powerful. One of the cool things you can do is "pipe" multiple
commands together, like so:

grep mumble | sed mumble | sed mumble | sed mumble > done.txt

Where each iteration of sed does it's own text manipulation magic and the
end result pops out in
done.txt

I have  a script that downloads a web "weather" page and uses grep and sed
to "snip" out the banner ads that
appear at the top of the page. When ECS shows it to me it is adless. :)

Fun stuff.

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Danks [mailto:sdanks@ci.tulsa.ok.us]
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 9:55 AM
To: ecs-list@netbloc.com
Subject: Re: RE: RE: RE: [ECS] MS Outlook and ECS


Well,  I have done that with my phone event, and it really doesnt work well.
I check the incoming number against the name listed in the text file, then I
pull in the associated wav file name to play, populate the variable the
holds the name of the wav file and then play it for the caller.  BUT, it
takes about 3 seconds of ringing time to read through 40-50 names.  I have
hundreds of relatives and potentially hundreds more friends and customers
and aquaintences.  Reading each byte one at a time is VERY SLOW.  But it is
very configurable. So I'm not knocking the ECS software, I'm just saying I
would like to see a different method for getting a whole variable from a
table at a time.  If it could talk to other programs like Excel, you could
export some numbers and call the excel spreadsheet and then go get the
answer to calculated formulas, or you could check the database for the
record containing that phone number and just go get the associated wav file
name to play.  Anyway, I may not know what I'm asking for ¯ maybe something
just magic, but if there was some way to talk to other programs I would
really like it.  Maybe in the long run, we just have to use text files to
communicate between programs.

>>> "David Kindred" <david@retroscape.com> 12/06 9:07 AM >>>
I haven't recently looked into writing data to text files in a long while,
but couldn't you use ECS to create a CSV (comma separated value) text file
that Access could import?

--David

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Danks [mailto:sdanks@ci.tulsa.ok.us] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 9:58 AM
To: ecs-list@netbloc.com 
Subject: Re: RE: RE: [ECS] MS Outlook and ECS


O.K. well, what I am trying to do really is have ECS talk to other programs
to get it's data.  I would like to have ECS be able to look into an msaccess
table and get the data, or put data in.  This would let us store information
for temperatures, or names and addresses, or just about anything.  AND this
would let us have a nice data input GUI that other "non techies" in the
family could use.  What would any of you recommend?    OR is there just not
an interface method for talking some generic data transfer to other
programs.?  I know that now, almost all the Microsoft products can get data
from each other, so I thought there MUST be some simple way of doing this?

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