Help please - comedian's joke data

  • Thread starter Thread starter Laurence Payne
  • Start date Start date
L

Laurence Payne

My friend is a veteran professional comedian. His database of jokes
is a large text document, exported from some previousy-used DOS
database. Each entry begins with a number of category words,
delimited by a particular character, $ or & I think (I haven't seen it
yet). Then a paragraph, followed by the body of text.

If I understand him correctly it looks something like:

&Irish&Sex&
Did you hear about the Irish grandmother who went on the pill? Didn't
want any more grandchildren

&Irish&car&
Irishman backed into boot sale, sold his engine

etc, etc. You get the idea?

He wants to be able to enter a selection of category words, then get a
printout of all matching jokes.

Tools available: Word, Access. Probably not particularly recent
versions.

I'm not asking to have the job done for me. But any suggestions what
approach I should take?

Thanks.
 
Did you hear of the comedian trying to use access for his jokes database?
No? Well, I haven't either.
Just kidding! :)

Access would be the most appropriate choice.
His jokes can be treated like any inventory item, and you can make this as
complicated as you want.
It appears that you want to maintain a list of jokes and assign multiple
categories to them.

Performing a search for Irish and Sex may be harder than performing a search
for Sex -
but that may just be because those Irish girls do not want to put out for an
ugly Indian.

HS
 
It can be done in Access but the keyword concept will cause a bit of
problem.

I'd look for a freeware or shareware program that is based on fulltext and
allows such things. The keywords could be left in place and he could look
for any of the words, not just the key words.
 
Each joke should get an identifying number (stored in a separate field).
Keywords should be separated out into a separate file, which lists each one
once, and also assigns it an identifying number.
Then you can build a "join" table, with a field for the joke and a field for
the keyword.
Thus if "Irish" is Keyword 1 and "Car" is Keyword 2, you will have a record
like this:
234 1
to indicate that joke 234 is about the Irish.
If there is no record like this:
234 2
then joke 234 is not about a car.

So if you want to return all jokes about Irish, you just search on 1 in the
keyword field.

HTH
- Turtle
 
Back
Top