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Wanderer Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 59

zMud ver 7.21

Anyone know an easy way to remove duplicate entries in a zMud database?

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

It has been a while since I really played with the database, so this might need some tweaking. Also this is entirely off the top of my head.

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Wanderer Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 59

Sweet!

Now I'm going to make it a little more complicated:

Say I want to removed entries with one field duplicated. For example:

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Wanderer Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 59

Some explaination of that, Dharkael?

I made an alias with that code in it, ran the alias, and received: "Duplicates found", like the #SHOW at the end of your code, without a value for @deletelist. Nothing else happened, and my database still has duplicates.

I assume I'm doing something wrong.

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Is the database window open when you're running the alias?
I think the database window has to be open when running code to affect the DB.
Type #SHOW %dblist(Name)
and it should show a stringlist of all the values in the Name column of your DB

I created a database named abc with the data you gave above and created an alias with the code I posted above.
Here's a line by line of what happens
=================================
Line 1:
Initialize an empty variable named deletelist

Line 2:
Call %dblist specifying Name as the column of values to return.
This returns a stringlist with every value in the name column. Bob|Dave|John|Steve|Steve|Steve
use %dups to remove any duplicate values now we have Bob|Dave|John|Steve
using #for execute the code within the braces following #for once for each item in the list.

Line 3:
use the %query function to get a list of record ids that have "Steve" for example in the name column
%query((&Name=Steve)) will return the list 4ab|5ab|6ab
we use %delnitem to remove the first item in the list (if there is only 1 item, meaning there are no duplicates we left with an empty list
we assign this list to the variable dbrep , in our example @dbrep is now 5ab|6ab

Line 4:
if @dbrep is not empty then we add its contents to the deletelist variable, if it is empty (meaning there was no duplicates for this name), we do nothing

Line 5:
loop through the list repeating lines 3 and 4 for each Name we got in line 2

Line 6:
use %dups to remove any duplicates, or empty items in the variable deletelist

Line 7:
Display the list of records we have to delete.
==================================

Thats it, now you can actually clear these duplicates by doing something like
#for @deletelist {#DBDELETE %i}

Hope that clears it up a bit.

Wanderer Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 59

It takes running it several (15+) times to clear out all the duplicates, finding/ removing a few each time, but it works.

Thanks!