[fpc-pascal] Opening .dta and .key files

[Luiz Américo]

Floris Bos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got a big problem. I've got an old program that's written in Turbo 
> Pascal, I don't know which version. I've only got the compiled 
> executable (.exe file), I haven't got the source code. The program works 
> with a database that consists of .dta and .key files which represent the 
> data tables.
> 
> The program has been used for years and the database contains lots of 
> data that has been build up through these years. The problem is that I 
> want to stop using this program but need to extract the data somehow. My 
> goal is to convert this Turbo Pascal database to MS Excel or MS Access 
> so that the data can be used by these MS Office applications.
> 
> Is there a way to accomplish this and if so, how? Any help would be very 
> much appreciated because this is a HUGE problem for me.
> 

It looks that these datafiles use proprietary format which will not be 
understood unless you have the source code (it's not the case) or you 
use reverse engineering techniques (really hard to accomplish).

The only way i see is to export the data to a text file using a possible 
report function of the program (if it exists) and then create a program 
to parse the file and save in the desired format.

Luiz