Programming

I'm in the UNIX environment. I'd like to read a Microsoft Access MDB file, and write the contents of that file into an ASCII text file. I want to write a C program to do this.

Does anyone know if there's already source code out there that does this?
Please advise. Thanks.

Check out ODBC libraries for your system - see
Accessing microsoft access from C program

Openoffice.org also has a database component that can read & write access files.

I should explain my problem better by describing what I'm doing:

My platform is on Solaris. I have already written C codes to
interpret data AFTER they got extracted from Microsoft Access. The way
it's done right now, is that the users have to go to a Windows PC, copy that MDB file onto the network drive on Solaris, open up MS Access, export each MDB file into a text file on the network drive on Solaris.

Because the Access data has several sets of data on each file, it's cumbersome for the users to do the output to ASCII text for every file.

Then, these users would run my C program to intepret all of that data (in ASCII text format). So I'd like to make it easier for the users when they export the MDB file.

And the way to do it is to copy each MDB file to the network drive on Solaris, read the Access mdb file from a C program on Solaris and
automatically output that MDB file into a text file, and then, this is tied into the second C program, which interprets that text file.

So I'm interested how to write the C program to read the MDB file and writing its content into an ASCII text file.

---------- Post updated at 05:50 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:30 PM ----------

Or better yet,

Is there a tool or command in line mode in the C shell that I can type that will convert an MDB file into a text file?

I would suggest that you write a utility to extract/convert the data on the Windows platform rather than on your Solaris platform.

None that I am aware of.