LOL! Jesse!jangell said:Found it. A bunch of really big ass excel files. Typical of the government. Wouldn't want to provide information in an actual database.
Time to go write some code to take this and dump it into something useful.
mikea said:LOL! Jesse!
The ATA100 data are fixed length delimited format ASCII data files, all in upper case. The guvmint is still using big iron and COBOL, son.
http://www.faa.gov/ATS/ata/ata100/120/stdatafiles.html
I'm surprised you found a version that Excel can grok, although Excel can read comma delimited files. Just because you can open the file in Excel doesn't mean it's an excel file. We had text files before Word was written, too.
It's available from the FAA on CD and it appears there that subscribers can FTP some subset of it. Some kind souls zip and host the files on the CD:
Here ya go:
http://data.pilotage.com/software/cd_faa Note the message: It is requested that you download these files after 10:00 PM and before 7:00 AM Pacific Time. Please do not transfer files between 7:00AM to 10:00PM. Thank You.
The first file has a data dictionary describing the layout. I think you can get it from the FAA site above. Now you know where airnav gets the data. He massages things like the text case with Perl.
Now excuse me while I visit a Mosiac page.
etsisk said:Nice attitude, there, Jesse.
Well, partly it was me ASSuming that he had found the ATA-100 data and thinking it was comman seperated. You forgot details in old age.tdager said:Damn Jesse...even I took Mike's comments and good-natured, ribbing.
You know, the kind amongst friends.
mikea said:Well, partly it was me ASSuming that he had found the ATA-100 data and thinking it was comman seperated. You forgot details in old age.
Still I can't see on page whatever they have in Excel format. The link doesn't work. The feds have no business issuing public data in a proprietary format.
Well, don't let it happen again and MAYBE you can use the truck this weekend . . .jangell said:Sorry Dad.
etsisk said:Well, don't let it happen again and MAYBE you can use the truck this weekend . . .
mikea said:Well, partly it was me ASSuming that he had found the ATA-100 data and thinking it was comman seperated. You forgot details in old age.
Still I can't see on page whatever they have in Excel format. The link doesn't work. The feds have no business issuing public data in a proprietary format.
Yep. The only reason OpenOffice and others can read Excel and Word files is because they reverse engineered the format. Microsoft has never documented it. I understand that Word files actually have a copy of part of the PC's memory footprint in them.SCCutler said:I agree wholeheartedly- is XLS truly proprietary? I know OpenOffice and QuattroPro can both open and save XLS files.
jangell said:Personally I'm just going to write a php script to dump the data into a mySQL database where I can further manipulate it.