The Art of Parsing

Let’s suppose that your boss comes to you with what he thinks is a wonderful idea. The phone company has sent him a disk containing the phone calls for the past month. They can provide this on a monthly basis. He wants you to transfer this list to an Access database so that he can tell who is making the longest calls. When you finally see the phone bill, it looks something like Table 19.2 (minus several thousand records).

Table 19.2. Raw Data Text File for the Phone Bill Table
2790017 9185436525 20001215 351NGTBixby 13538547 24 168
2790017 9184681269 20001129 824DAYBixby 10538547 18 180
2790017 9184681181 20001227 101NGTBixby 3538547 4 28
2790017 9185459191 20001227 102NGTBixby 2538547 2 14
2790017 9185448823 20001227 301NGTBixby ...

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