building polyglot books

[Hugo]

Hello

sometimes I get problems building a polyglot book from a pgn database.
Error message > malformed tag at line 27351 column 26 <

What does that mean, and how can I check a pgn base for errors and illegal moves?

Thanks in advance, Clemens K.

[Volker Pittlik]

Hello

sometimes I get problems building a polyglot book from a pgn database.
Error message > malformed tag at line 27351 column 26 <

What does that mean, and how can I check a pgn base for errors and illegal moves?..

Polyglot somehow does not understand what is written in the pgn. Open the pgn file with an editor and go to the line polyglot is complaining about. Sometimes there is a problem with "'" or similar in a event name.


vp

[Rubinus]

Or example 60"+15' - needed 60+15 etc.

[Hugo]

Thank you Volker and Pavel

it was a little work to get this things fixed.
First I needed an editor that was able to build numbers for the lines.
Open office was a great help for that.
Then I had to fix all those faults. Took me 20 Minutes for a 25.000 games base.
result is a polyglot book with only 393 Kb.

Regards, Clemens

[Rubinus]

My concept is first database any CBH format. Repair in Chessbase (game heads, delete commentary "--" and fragments/FRC etc.) and export to PGN.
Regards Pavel Háse

[garybelton]

Hint I found, it's much easier to use pgn-extract with the -C and -D flags on the pgn first, this takes a few seconds fixes a lot of things and after that polyglot has far fewer problems.

The other thing is to use the very latest polyglot as they fixed some parsing errors at some point, I use the latest one from here http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algeb ... t-release/

These tips will save you much time if you need to do it again. There still could be one or two rouge problems you need to fix though.

[Guenther]

Thank you Volker and Pavel

it was a little work to get this things fixed.
First I needed an editor that was able to build numbers for the lines.
Open office was a great help for that.
Then I had to fix all those faults. Took me 20 Minutes for a 25.000 games base.
result is a polyglot book with only 393 Kb.

Regards, Clemens

Uhhm, Open Office is not really an editor ;-)
You should try a real advanced editor, perhaps (free)Notepad++ for Win
or UltraEdit. OTH you probably had saved more time if you first had run
your 'pgn'(I guess more a kind of pseudo pgn cramped by some CB
software?) through one of the free pgn normalisation tools(e.g. PGN Extract).

Guenther

[garybelton]

I use MED text editor, it's really good for programmers:

http://www.utopia-planitia.de/indexus.html

If I need to load GB's of file to edit then MED won't do it as it fails (maybe it tries to load all the file into ram) in that case I use JuJu editor:

http://www.jujusoft.com/software/edit/

This is windows, on Linux I use cream.