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

Rohit:

Here is what I planned to do, along with a snag I think is present. I wrote Wolfram himself -- he gives out his eMail.

Dr. Wolfram:

I am a retired neurologist who is trying to move a large (for me) database in HyperCard to Mathematica. One HyperCard ‘stack’ contains 16,000+ cards taking up 79 megabyes, another 23 K in 16 megaBytes etc. etc. I was impressed that you can find what you want in about 100K of your notebooks. I don’t think it would be a problem to convert each card to a uniquely named notebook.

Your search system as described in “Adventures of a Computational Explorer” seems to be by topic and ideas. That won’t work for me — I need to search for strings in stacks.

Here is an example showing why.

We understand relatively little about the way the brain works and cellular biochemistry. One of this morning’s HyperCard entries involves Nature volume 596 pp. 570 - 575 ’21 which is about a rare neurological disorder called Niemann Pick disease. They found that one of the mutations causing the disease (in a protein called NPC1) causes changes in the way another protein involved in viral defense called STING is handled by the cell.

This was totally unexpected and a priori unpredictable. It is also exactly what makes reading about cellular biochemistry/physiology so fascinating.

So in HyperCard I just put in a link between one of my cards for Niemann Pick (#10992) and that for STING (#4955). It’s clear that I could do that in Mathematica using a button. But to find #4955 I had to search for STING in the whole 79 megaBases. I think this would likely take a long time in a folder containing 16 K + notebooks. Or does Mathematica have a way around this?

Any help you, or your staff could give would be greatly appreciated

Lewis Robinson M. D.

ReadList returns a List with a single string rather than a String. Give your file a .txt extension and Import will import it as a String.

You are still left with the problem of splitting that string into separate strings for each card. That is what my previous answer did. Once you have then you can process each string (card) to extract id's, cross-reference, names/id's etc.

How are you planning to represent the card data in WL and what UI do you plan to construct on top of it to permit easy navigation?