[FX.php List] PHP direct access of FileMaker data

[Paul Novitski]

At 11/16/2007 06:40 AM, Derrick Fogle wrote:
>Open an FM database in a text editor. See the data, in plain text?
>Sure, it's possible. Just difficult to reverse-engineer the file
>format and not damage the database in the process of reading it.

I had previously glanced inside a couple of FileMaker tables and 
thought they were pure binary data, but on second glance (opening 
them with "Western European (Mac) - Codepage 10000" encoding) I see 
that they appear to be XML-ish but with quite a bit of content that's 
not resolving to comprehensible text in my text editors.  This might 
be because I'm still not using the right encoding, or it might be 
that the XML is embedded in a binary matrix that likely wouldn't be 
worth my time to try to reverse-engineer.

If I could open them as plain XML I'd be stylin'!

(PS: I have no fears of damaging a file when opening it for read-only access.)


>The simplest solution to your problem, from my perspective, is
>modifying the export of the data from the customer's database so that
>you have all the data from all the tables to mirror in your MySQL DB.

I'm currently seeing that as the most likely solution -- unless it 
turns out I can use another text encoding and read the files as 
straight XML, which at this point seems unlikely.

Regards,
Paul