cptool

basic manipulation of CP files

Background

CP files are a (more or less) proprietary file format used by a major vendor of sport timekeeping technology and result service provider. The file format is a mix of Windows INI files and CSV files. The sections of the INI file can be considered as tables. The rows of a section are the rows of the table. Each row contains a number of columns delimited by semicolons. Sections/tables start with the name of the table enclosed in square brackets. There is an (optionally?) blank line between subsequent tables.

A special table named "Definition" should be placed at the beginning of the file. It contains key-value pairs (separated by "=") with table names as key. The values are the names of the columns inside that table. Column names are delimited by semicolons as well.

There is no usage of quotes, thus columns should not contain semicolons.

Usually, CP files are encoded with ISO-8859-1. However, cptool requires them to be provided in UTF-8.

Usage

cptool.py [OPTIONS] [input [input ...]]

cptool uses the provided input files and consumes them as if they were merged into a single file. If multiple input files contain tables with the same name (except for the Definition table), subsequent occurances are ignored and only the first table is considered for further processing. The --merge option can be used to change this behaviour. If no input is specified, stdin is read.

Without further options, cptool reads the inputs and produces a (nearly) identical output. The command line options can be used to modify the processing to some extent, which is basically selection of desired tables.

command line options:

• -d TABLES, --delete TABLES

  Delete the TABLES with the given names. They are not considered for further processing. Multiple tables can be seperated by commas. By default, no tables are deleted.

• -m, --merge

  Merge tables that have the same name and occur several times in the inputs. The fields of the first seen table(s) are extended by subsequent table(s) if their field count is larger than the already known ones.

• -o FILE, --output FILE

  Save the output in the given FILE. The default output file is stdout.

• -S TABLES, --select TABLES

  Only output the provided TABLES. Multiple tables are delimited by commas. By default all encoutered tables are considered for output. The option can be considered as the opposite to the -d|--delete option.

• -s, --sort

  Sort the tables that will be output by their names. By default, tables are emitted in order of their occurance. This may be used to beautify the output.

• -x, --xml

  Store the output as UTF-8 encoded XML. For each table, the XML contains as much elements as rows are present in that table. The element is named as the table. Each row element contains as many child elements as stated in the definition. The child elements are named after the column names. In case, there were no field names provided, no elements are output.