Reading the Retired.DAT file

[falkonisback]

Has anybody figured out how to do this? The only piece of information I'm looking for is the year that each player retired so that I can use it for the 5 year eligibility rule for the Hall of Fame. I figured if it would be anywhere, it would be in this file.

If anybody knows how I can find this piece of information, please let me know.

Thanks!!!!

[Tony M]

As far as I know and I've deciphered a lot of the .dat files I couldn't find anything in there that related to the date of retirement - it only appears to be in the text file for the player.

[falkonisback]

Man, that's silly. I would have thought that piece of information would be really easy to save somewhere.

Anybody else have any thoughts on this?

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by falkonisback

Man, that's silly. I would have thought that piece of information would be really easy to save somewhere.

Anybody else have any thoughts on this?

I've just ran a 2 team league for a few years to get a few retired and there is definitely nothing in the bits I haven't deciphered that looks in the correct format for a date. The player I was looking at retired on the 1st January 2009 so I'd expect to see the following sequence of numbers in those areas 1, 1, 219, 7, 0, 0, 0 but there isn't...

I once toyed with creating a lahman style file set from the data in a game but couldn't find the retired date in the files - I could go through and parse the text files but that's a bit too much processing.

[billethius]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

I've just ran a 2 team league for a few years to get a few retired and there is definitely nothing in the bits I haven't deciphered that looks in the correct format for a date. The player I was looking at retired on the 1st January 2009 so I'd expect to see the following sequence of numbers in those areas 1, 1, 219, 7, 0, 0, 0 but there isn't...

I once toyed with creating a lahman style file set from the data in a game but couldn't find the retired date in the files - I could go through and parse the text files but that's a bit too much processing.

If you used a regular expression and a perl, python, or ruby script it shouldn't be too bad. You could probably write the script in 5 minutes (assuming you know a scripting language and a bit about regular expressions) and then just point it at the directory and let it run.

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by billethius

If you used a regular expression and a perl, python, or ruby script it shouldn't be too bad. You could probably write the script in 5 minutes (assuming you know a scripting language and a bit about regular expressions) and then just point it at the directory and let it run.

grep is your friend

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by billethius

If you used a regular expression and a perl, python, or ruby script it shouldn't be too bad. You could probably write the script in 5 minutes (assuming you know a scripting language and a bit about regular expressions) and then just point it at the directory and let it run.

Yeah, I know I could, and I could probably knock it up in a few minutes in VB as well.

So anyway, to the OP, the only way to do it is to look at the last line of any player_nnnn.txt where they have retired and parse the date from it.