BDDB -- Brain Dead DataBase software

I have written a very simple and primitive database search engine in Perl (though I plan to port it to C soon, for speed). It accepts human-readable, plaintext database files in this format:

# comments start with a "#" at the beginning of a any line that is
# outside an entry.  Entries are delimited with "&&&START" and
# "&&&END", as you can see.  Each entry can have arbitrary fields;
# only TITLE and URL are treated specially by the software, and then
# only in output, not in searching.  Here are three entries:

&&&START
&&&TITLE Chicago Restaurants
&&&KEYS food chicago
&&&URL http://www.webcore.com:80/chicago/eatsleepmerry/restaurants/restaurants.shtml
&&&END

&&&START
&&&TITLE Siu Yuin Pang
&&&KEYS People Siu Yuin Pang siuyuin Xiu Yun xiuyuin
&&&URL http://www.oberlin.edu/~spang
&&&DESC A friend who didn't give permission to be used as an example
        like this.
&&&END

&&&START
&&&TITLE Largest Known Primes
&&&KEYS mathematics
&&&URL http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/largest.shtml
&&&DESC If the title weren't so descriptive already, I'd put a
     description here.
&&&END

[etc...]

It outputs either plaintext or HTML. You can ask it to search on any fields you want; I normally use TITLE and KEYS.

The software is not currently available via ftp, though it could be. Ask me if you want it.

(Back to Karl Fogel's home page.)