Microsoft Visual FoxPro DBF for Go

Golang package for reading and writing FoxPro dBase tables (DBF), databases (DBC) and related memo (FPT) files.

Programming language: Go

License: BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License

Tags: Database     Go     Package     Golang     Foxpro     DBF     Dbase    

README

Microsoft Visual FoxPro DBF for Go

Golang package for reading and writing FoxPro dBase table and memo files.

Features

There are several similar packages but they are not suited for our use case, this package implements the following features:

Feature	go-dbase	go-dbf	go-foxpro-dbf
Encoding support ¹	✅	✅*	✅
Read	✅	✅	✅
Write	✅	✅	❌
FPT (memo) file support	✅	❌	✅
Struct, json, map conversion	✅	❌	✅
IO efficiency ²	✅	❌	✅
Full data type support	✅	❌	❌
Exclusive Read/Write³	✅	❌	❌
Search	✅	❌	❌
Create new tables, including schema	✅	❌	❌
Open database	✅	❌	❌

¹ This package currently supports 13 of the 25 possible encodings, but a universal encoder will be provided for other code pages that can be extended at will. A list of supported encodings can be found here. The conversion in the go-foxpro-dbf package is extensible, but only Windows-1250 as default and the code page is not interpreted.

² IO efficiency is achieved by using one file handle for the DBF file and one file handle for the FPT file. This allows for non blocking IO and the ability to read files while other processes are accessing these. In addition, only the required positions in the file are read instead of keeping a copy of the entire file in memory.

³ The files can be opened completely exclusively and when writing a file, the data block to be written can be locked during the process. This is done to prevent other processes from writing the same data block. When reading, this is not a concern as the data is not changed.

Disclaimer: This library should never be used to develop new software solutions with dbase tables. The creation of new tables only serves to transfer old databases or to remove faulty data.

Supported column types

At this moment not all FoxPro column types are supported. When reading column values, the value returned by this package is always interface{}. If you need to cast this to the correct value, helper functions are provided.

The supported column types with their return Go types are:

Column Type	Column Type Name	Golang type
C	Character	string
Y	Currency	float64
B	Double	float64
D	Date	time.Time
T	DateTime	time.Time
F	Float	float64
I	Integer	int32
L	Logical	bool
M	Memo	string
M	Memo (Binary)	[]byte
N	Numeric (0 decimals)	int64
N	Numeric (with decimals)	float64
Q	Varbinary	[]byte
V	Varchar	[]byte
W	Blob	[]byte
G	General	[]byte
P	Picture	[]byte

If you need more information about dbase data types take a look here: Microsoft Visual Studio Foxpro

Supported encodings

The following encodings are supported by this package:

Code page	Platform	Code page identifier
437	U.S. MS-DOS	x01
850	International MS-DOS	x02
852	Eastern European MS-DOS	x64
865	Nordic MS-DOS	x66
866	Russian MS-DOS	x65
874	Thai Windows	x7C
1250	Central European Windows	xC8
1251	Russian Windows	xC9
1252	Windows ANSI	x03
1253	Greek Windows	xCB
1254	Turkish Windows	xCA
1255	Hebrew Windows	x7D
1256	Arabic Windows	x7E

All encodings are converted from and to UTF-8.

Installation

go get github.com/Valentin-Kaiser/go-dbase/dbase

Projects

Projects using this package:

👻 G(h)oST

Examples

These examples can be found in the [examples](./examples/) directory:

• [Read](./examples/read/read.go)
• [Write](./examples/write/write.go)
• [Search](./examples/search/search.go)
• [Create](./examples/create/create.go)
• [Database](./examples/database/database.go)