gurgle

As of May 04, 2001, 'grg' has been renamed GURGLE. Reads record and field information from a dBase 3+ file, delimited ASCII text file, or an SQL query to a RDBMS and produces a report listing. The program was designed primarily to produce a TeX/LaTeX formatted output, but plain ASCII text, troff, PostScript, HTML, or any other kind of ASCII based output format can be produced also.

The program is ideal for generating large bodies of text where various parts of the text are substituted with information from a database. It's particularly useful for generating mainly static web pages with small amounts of dynamic content.

A definition file controls the formatting process, which holds the report, page, and record layouts, what fields to display, and where. Other useful functions include sorting, filtering, and data manipulation of records in the database. Main features include:

Multiple input databases or queries
Support for ASCII delimited text, dBase 3+, CA-Ingres, GNU SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases
Sorting of database records
Automatic banner placement at the start of each sorted group
Filters using regular expressions or useer defined function
Five main text bodies-- header, footer, record, 1st page, and nth page
User defined macros, text bodies, and equations on field contents, including the conditionals
User configurable input parsing patterns (default is like awk)
Include files
Environment variables
System variables
Multiple file output
General purpose processing language
Optional GUILE support