Parsing fish harvest Email with Perl

Steve Kocsis
Alaska Region, NMFS

This paper will describe the system used for keeping track of the Alaska region fish harvest through Email. It incorporates Visual Basic, Perl, Oracle, PL/SQL, Windows and UNIX. It has been in use since 1998 and is generalized to accept a family of data types. Each client shoreside processor or vessel is supplied with a Windows Visual Basic form to enter the catch. The data is stored in an ASCII file which is Emailed, as an attachment, to a UNIX server in Juneau.

Perl, Practical Extraction and Report Language, is used to read the Email, determine which attachments are from valid clients, transfer data to the Oracle database, and send acknowledgments to the clients. The client receives a list of errors with the intention that revised data will be sent. The client may also send deletions and/or updates to previously transmitted files. These are automatically handled by the system.

The data is used by NMFS Alaska to make fisheries management decisions, fisheries analysis and to post current harvests on the Alaska region web page. The system was designed to allow the addition of new data types as demands change.

Perl is suited for this task with it's powerful regular expression tools and modules for Email, parsing and database interface. The language is supported, free of charge, through the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network web site.