Comparing two CSV files and generating a 3rd output file

[solaris955]

Hi everyone,

Lovely forum, and this is my second post here - perhaps some wonderful people can up with some suggestions for my issue :). Thanks a bunch :Partydude:.

Here is what I am trying to achieve.

Basically, I have a wholesaler who sends my orders directly to my customers. I need to make sure that all my stock numbers are up-to-date.

The wholesaler gives me a stock-status file (with product numbers - which products are in stock and which ones are out-of-stock) in a CSV format. The wholesaler sells around 18,000 products but I only sell 500 + of them to my retail customers.

I need a script that will compare two CSV data files and produce an output as a 3rd file.

The 1st file will contain roughly 18,000 entries.
It will have 2 columns in it - one column with product codes, and another column - with their stock availability numbers.

The 2nd file will contain around 500 entries - these are the products that I sell.
It will contain 1 column with product codes in it.

The 3rd output file should contain all the matching entries from the 1st columns of both files + stock availability numbers from the 2nd column of the first file.

I have found some suggestions on Stackflow about how this could be achieved, for example via awk.

The thing is I haven’t got a clue what to do because I am not a programmer :).

Perhaps some one could do it for me for a fee?

Thanks very much in advance,
Irina

[cheesedude]

@solaris955

Here is what I am trying to achieve.

Basically, I have a wholesaler who sends my orders directly to my customers. I need to make sure that all my stock numbers are up-to-date.

The wholesaler gives me a stock-status file (with product numbers - which products are in stock and which ones are out-of-stock) in a CSV format. The wholesaler sells around 18,000 products but I only sell 500 + of them to my retail customers.

I need a script that will compare two CSV data files and produce an output as a 3rd file.

You could load the CSV data into a database and do the comparisons using SQL and output the query results back into any format you like. Maybe PHP and SQLite could be used? Using a database and SQL is going to be much easier than writing the logic to do the comparison yourself.

@solaris955

The thing is I haven’t got a clue what to do because I am not a programmer .

Perhaps some one could do it for me for a fee?

A lot of programmers should be able to do this for you and it should not cost too much. Check one of the freelance programmer boards.

[solaris955]

Thank you very much for your reply, Cheesdude :).

Could you please kindly give me a link to the freelance programmers’ board here - I couldn’t find any.

Thanks again!