I'd guess that these two file types are data and index files produced by the programmer of your TP program when he used the "Turbo Pascal Database Toolbox" as the database manager. Borland gave some hints that they might release the source code for these toolboxes a few years ago but I've yet to see it actually happen. Until such time as that occurs, it's not available above board.
If I remember correctly (both the manuals for the TP3 CP/M and DOS and TP4 DOS are at home), there's a "block" of header information of the same size as the block of data that comprises each record of the database, in the datafile. Try to detect a pattern of repeats of similar looking stuff in the file to ascertain the length of the blocks. Then, you can try to detect how long the individual fields are within the block. The database toolboxes wrote straight up TP binary data into their files. That's to say that an integer was stored as (what?) little endian two byte signed integers and longints kinda the same, strings as length chr with the balance of the full length of the type of the string following. You get the idea. The index files were likely recreated upon each run of the program on the fly. It was pretty much the programmer's responsibility to maintain them (unlike dBase). So, I'd further guess that you've got a couple of lunch breaks of data spelunking ahead of you. Stu -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Floris Bos Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 11:11 AM To: fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org Subject: [fpc-pascal] Opening .dta and .key files Hi, I've got a big problem. I've got an old program that's written in Turbo Pascal, I don't know which version. I've only got the compiled executable (.exe file), I haven't got the source code. The program works with a database that consists of .dta and .key files which represent the data tables. The program has been used for years and the database contains lots of data that has been build up through these years. The problem is that I want to stop using this program but need to extract the data somehow. My goal is to convert this Turbo Pascal database to MS Excel or MS Access so that the data can be used by these MS Office applications. Is there a way to accomplish this and if so, how? Any help would be very much appreciated because this is a HUGE problem for me. Thanks in advance! _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
