Excel *should* have worked just fine. The DBF format is not hard to understand, ... | Hacker News

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		mikestew on Nov 9, 2016 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Micro web-framework for COBOL Excel should have worked just fine. The DBF format is not hard to understand, and it was documented in the manual that came with (IIRC) both dBase and FoxPro (I can still picture the page in my head from the FoxBase+ manual). Just a header with a record count and some field definitions, then the data. I haven't tried, but I bet with the docs in front of me I could write a parser in any number of languages in about 30 minutes, 30 minutes more to write to the DBF without corrupting it. You're on your own for indices, I never had to crack that nut. :-)

pjmlp on Nov 9, 2016 [–]

Yes, sometime around 1992 I got a Turbo Pascal unit as shareware, that could handle them.

Indexes were some form of B+ Trees.

Back in those days I toyed with the idea of porting it to Turbo Pascal for Windows, but then never got to do it actually.

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