RE: Shopping lists, bar code readers & databases

[Robert Chasmer <robert.chasmer@xxxxxxx>]

Stuart Grimshaw [mailto:stuart@xxxxxxx] wrote:
> This old chestnut :-)
> How much progress did members of the list make?

Hmm, I have two Welch Barcode scanners, one at home, one at work.  I
only
had one power transformer which I had at work, so I havn't got much
coding
done on it for a while.  Last weekend I wired up a second PSU, to try
and
get things going again.

Hopefully I'll have something I can release soon, watch this space.


> Did anyone manage to import the Tesco database into something
usable?
> Are there any other supermarkets that provide product lists?

I spent a bit of time trying to extract a tab seperated file from this
dat
file, and maybe decode a barcode for each product.  The file seems to
have
12,140 products in it which I guess might be all the ones they stock.

There is a 4 byte string before each product which I thought might be
an
encoded integer but at this precision could only hold numbers 0 to
4294967296 or 10 digits.  Though most barcodes are 13 digits including
the
check digit.  It could just be another unique product ID which Tescos
uses
but I'd hoped not.

I put my decoded file up on Yahoo in the barcode group, which has now
gone
as far as I know, in the hope that someone else can get a barcode out of
the
string.  It descibes the 4 digits as decimal numbers and tries a
couple of
the standard integer decodings.  I can mail anyone the 200k file if
they are
interested.

I also have a database containing 246,000 barcodes and descriptions I
got
>from
since I know someone else was selling a CD with a similar amount of
barcodes.  This mostley seemed to be for US products anyway.


Rob
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