DBF file indexer?

[Daniel Morissette]

Sean O'Hagan wrote:
> 
> Hello list,
> 
> Has anybody found a good utility for indexing those large DBF files that
> store the attributes for shape files? Is there such a beast?
> 

There are a couple of Open source libs that will read/write DBF files,
but I have never found one that supports reading/writing .NTX (or .NDX?)
files...  I would be interested in hearing about it as well if one
exists.  I know that there is some format information at:
	http://www.e-bachmann.dk/docs/xbase.htm
and there may be some in other places I guess.

If I had had the time I would have already implemented a lib to
read/write .NTX (or .NDX) files since I could use that myself... (or
maybe I should take the time and do it?!?)  

However, here is another option if you want to do some coding... it's a
hack, but it would work! MapInfo stores its table information in a
format that is similar to .DBF files, and they store their indexes in
.IND files.  I have written some C++ code to read/write MapInfo .IND
indexes as part of my lib to read/write MapInfo TAB datasets.  One could
extract the code to handle MapInfo's .IND files and use that to index
his .DBF files.

Please keep us posted on whatever you find.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette                       danmo at videotron.ca
              http://pages.infinit.net/danmo/
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.