Changes¶

Release History¶

Sometimes numeric (N) and float fields (F) are padded with ‘*’. These are now stripped. (Reported by sgiangola and Matungos, issue #10.)
added char_decode_errors option which lets you choose how to handle characters that can’t be decoded. (Implemented by ZHU Enwei, pull request #16.)
added --char-decode-errors option to dbf2sqlite.
added dbfread.version_info.

Added support for long character (C) fields (up to 65535 bytes). (Requested by Eric Mertens and Marcelo Manzano.)
Added support for Visual FoxPro varchar fields (V). (Thanks to Roman Kharin for reporting and bobintetley for providing a solution.)
Bugfix (dbf2sqlite): some table or field names might actually collide with sql reserved words. (Fix by vthriller, pull request #15.)
Documented how to convert records to Pandas data frames. (Thanks to Roman Yurchak for suggesting this.)

Bugfix: memo field parser used str instead of bytes. (Fix submitted independently by Sebastian Setzer (via email) and by Artem Vlasov, pull request #11.)
Bugfix: some field parsers called self._get_memo() instead of self.get_memo(). (Fix by Yu Feng, pull request #9.)

DBF header and field headers are no longer read-only. For example you can now change field names by doing table.fields[0].name = 'price' or read from files where field sizes in the header don’t match those in the actual records by doing table.fields[0].length = 500.
fixed some examples that didn’t work with Python 3.

bugfix: a date with all zeroes in the DBF header resulted in ‘ValueError: month must be in 1..12’. (Reported by Andrew Myers.) The date attribute is now set to None for any value that is not a valid date.

bugfix: didn’t handle field names with garbage after b‘0’ terminator. (Patch by Cédric Krier.)
now handles 0 (_NullFlags) fields that are more than 1 byte long. 0 fields are now returned as byte strings instead of integers. (Reported by Carlos Huga.)
the type B field is a double precision floating point numbers in Visual FoxPro. The parser crashed when it tried to interpret this as a string containing a number. (Reported by Carlos Huga.)
API changes: memo field parsers now return the memo data (typically a unicode string or bytes object) instead of returning the index. This makes it easier to implement new memo types or extend the existing ones since memo fields are no longer a special case.

dbfread.open() and dbfread.read() are now deprecated and will be removed in 1.4. Since the DBF object is no longer a subclass of list, these functions instead return backward compatible DeprecatedDBF objects.
records are now returned as ordered dictionaries. This makes it easier to iterate over fields in the same order that they appear in the file.
now reads (at least some) DBT files.
added support for 6 new field types.
added ignore_missing_memofile argument. If True and the memo file is not found all memo fields will be returned as None.
DBF now raises DBFNotFound and MissingMemoFile. These inherit from IOError, so old code should still work.
added InvalidValue. This is currently not used by the library but can be useful for custom parsing.
FieldParser is now available in the top scope.
wrote documentation.
switched to pytest for unit tests.

the DBF object is no longer a subclass of list. Records are instead available in the records attribute, but the table can be iterated over like before. This change was made to make the API cleaner and easier to understand. read() is still included for backwards compatability, and returns an OldStyleTable object with the old behaviour.
default character encoding is now "ascii". This is a saner default than the previously used "latin1", which would decode but could give the wrong characters.
the DBF object can now be used as a context manager (using the “with” statement).

critical bugfix: each record contained only the last field. (Introduced in 1.0.5, making that version unusable.)
improved performance of record reading a bit.

This version is broken.

bugfix: crashed when record list was not terminated with b’x1a’. (Bug first apperad in 1.0.2 after a rewrite.)
bugfix: memo fields with no value were returned as ‘’. They are now returned correctly as None.
bugfix: field header terminaters were compared with strings.
added example parserclass_debugstring.py.

added example record_objects.py.
removed parserclass option to allow for internal changes. There is currently no (documented) way to add custom field types.

bugfix: deleted records were ignored when using open().
memo file is now opened and closed by each iterator instead of staying open all the time.

records can now be streamed from the file, making it possible to read data files that are too large to fit in memory.
documentation is more readable and complete.
now installs correctly with easy_install.
added “–encoding” option to dbf2sqlite which can be used to override character encoding.

Initial release.