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Rechnungs Checker 1.0.6

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After a short break here comes another little update to Rechnungs Checker. This version features support for yet another file format, that of German phone company Arcor and fixes a little display bug.

Rechnungs Checker icon. What’s more interesting to report are the things that didn’t happen. Thanks to a user request, I tried to implement support for another phone company’s file format. Just that they didn’t have any file downloads, so people would’ve had to copy stuff from the web page into a text editor and then save it to a file. Not a big deal. While this seemed quite incompetent and broken by itself, the format of data presentation was the worst I’ve seen so far.

While their data appeared in a web browser for display it wasn’t laid out nicely in a table or so, but rather presented in a comma separated way line per line. Just that it wasn’t actually comma separated, because one of the columns regularly included commas in its data. Haha, fun! Even funnier, they would give dates with a weekday but without a year which isn’t particularly critical for Rechnungs Checker, but weird anyway. And to finish things off they’d use time formats 00:30 to denote calls starting at half past midnight, with no seconds specified and they’d equally use 00:30 to denote calls that lasted 30 seconds.

So, in short this was a bit messy – data that wasn’t presented nicely but neither suitable for easy parsing… and once I had all of it sorted out – they changed the data’s format to a slightly different one, which is just a regular expression away and at least separate fields properly but still sub-standard. So I decided to give up on that file format for the moment and wait until it’s more stabilised.

January 13, 2005, 23:36

Tagged as earthlingsoft, Rechnungs Checker.

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