Hello Eliot. I can relate to your question because I also was confused about this when I first started the assignment. My confusion came from an email I received from the Yahoo group when I first registered. This email talked specifically about a separate conversion tool. I think this is carry over from the original Fly by Night
SCJD assigment (which has been replaced by URLyBird and Bodgitt and Harper, or something like that. I have URLyBird)
Anyway, while we don't need a separate conversion tool with the new assignment, you do need some way of reading the data out of a file. Some of the people (including me) end up having a DataSchema type of class. This class has methods to spin through the database file, deal with the magic cookie (see
magic cookie thread ) and read all the header information to get the number of fields, field names, field lengths, etc. (see the part of your data file format before the Data Section.
The way I got started on all that was after I read the cookie
thread I mention above I started working with the file to read out the information. Most people out here are using the RandomAccessFile class in some way to do this. See methods readInt, readFully(byte[]), readShort, etc.
Some other potential search words for you on this forum might be "data schema" or "metadata".
Good luck.
TJ