Rohit: I appreciate your interest, and a much longer reply will be forthcoming tomorrow. Thank you.

Rohit thank you very much. After posting I solved the problem another way with the very UNintuitive

ReadList [ "/Users/lewisrobinson/Desktop/  Cards  9461  to  9462", \
String ] 

Here's what it gives me

{"Total Number of Cards =  2 ", "Begin  card \"X1766697\" ", "card id \
1897041 ", "Nature vol. 316 p 457 - 460 '85 ", "4 ", "\"Choroid \
plexus tumors\" ", "1711804    Xref ", "\"SV40\" ", "1433061    \
glossary ", "\"SV40 -- moreInfo\" ", "2104481    Xref ", \
"\"Transgenic animals\" ", "1512732    \"glossary\" ", "1 ", \
"Oncogenes", "1 ", "       Transgenic mice with SV40 early genes die \
of choroid plexus papillomas at age 3 -5 months. Elevated SV40 T \
antigen and SV40 mRNA are present in affected tissues.  If the SV40 \
enhancer region is deleted, there is peripheral neuropathy rather \
than choroid plexus tumors, and there are liver and pancreatic tumors \
as well.  ", "End  card \"X1766697\" ", "Begin  card \"X1773629\" ", \
"card id 1903962 ", "Nature vol. 316 pp 596 - 605 '85 ", "1 ", \
"\"Repressor\" ", "1279797    glossary ", "1 ", "Gene expression", "1 \
", "      Good evidence exists that by changing one face of one alpha \
helix, you can alter the specificity of DNA binding proteins (lambda \
repressor, cro repressor, P22 activator).   Crystal structures of the \
models show that this helix lies in the major dense groove of the DNA \
binding site.  The other 3.5 alpha helices of the repressors remain \
unchanged.  One face of the helix barrel is enough. ", "End  card \
\"X1773629\" "}

I'm new to Mathematica, but either should solve the basic transfer problem. The metadata is quite stylized as you can see, and I can deal with each card separately, once the data is broken down into strings.

I have 16 K cards, 22 K indexes 8 K glossary items. Hypercard allows you to put the items of a similar type (cards, indexes, glossary) in stacks and you can easily move between items in a given stack. Do you think I'll have a problem with nearly 50K notebooks (one per item). I do love the way Mathematica has programmed links for you, as I estimate I have 80 K of these, linking items in different stacks together.

Hi Lewis,

Not clear exactly what you are trying to do. Using the sample data you gave in this question, I saved it to a text file (attached). Then

cards = Import["~/Downloads/hypercard.txt"]
cardList = cards // 
  StringCases["Begin card" ~~ c : Shortest[___] ~~ "End card" :> StringTrim@c]

Gives a list of strings where each string is the text between "Begin card" and "End card".

If that example is not representative of the data you are working with, please provide a sample.

Attachments:

hypercard.txt