Good morning.

Short question: How would you convert sqlite databases/files to dbf-format?

Long explication: I can export sqlite to csv and convert csv to DBase-format and maybe I will just do that in the little “project” that I ponder.

My favorite Office-suite (see there) allows, like all the others, to connect a document to a database. For historical reasons, the only database-format supported is still DBase.

They used to include in their Windows versions a database tool which was IMHO a clone of the old StarBase-program from StarDivision (later Sun and StarOffice, then ...).

Now that the office-suite for Linux becomes more and more popular, the lack of a decent and integrated GUI for the definition and management of databases is often lamented. Apart from the fact, that I have personally no use for such a tool and even less for its integration (what's that anyway) into the office-suite, I wonder, if I could not help “to integrate” SQLite and existing front-ends by providing a simple conversion-tool.

This way, any existing and modern utilities which work with SQLite could be used to provide DBase-files for use with the office-suite. The latter permits already the execution of external commands with the help of user-defined tool-buttons.

It is possible that a shell-script suffices. Or I write a Ruby-script. But maybe none of this is necessary. My search for existing conversion tools was futile so far. You can even provide me with the link to a successful search if you know better criteria than mine.

Looking at the documentation, there doesn't seem to be a need to convert the csv file any further as it can be directly imported. I think the main issue I can see is that you need to
have the tables created prior to the import with the correct fields so the import will work. So I see it being a 2 step process where first you need to export the table details to first create
any required tables and then perform the export into csv format.

On the other hand, ruby does have both an sqlite and dbf gems, so you may be able to simply open and read through one and import into the other on the fly

Thank you.

I ignored the existence of the sqlite gem. The dbf gem is already part of a dbf2vcf script that I have written (rather dbf2text with user-provided mappings). So, if there is no existing “tool” for the conversion, I feel like writing one.