Introduction

The grg program reads record and field information from a dBase3+ file, delimited ascii text file or a SQL query to a RDBMS and produces a report listing. The program was loosely designed to produce TeX/LaTeX formatted output, but plain ascii text, troff, PostScript, HTML or any other kind of ascii based output format can be produced just as easily. The grg program is ideal for generating large bodies of text where various parts of the text are substituted with information from a database.

The formatting process of grg is controlled by the GRG file. This defines the report, page, and record layouts, what fields to display, and where. Other useful facilities the GRG file provides include sorting, filtering, and data manipulation of records in the database. Below is a summary of the main features that can be used in a GRG file.

• Sorting of database records
• Automatic banner placement at the start of each sorted group.
• Filtering using regular expressions.
• Five main text bodies -- header, footer, record, 1st page, and Nth page.
• User defined macros and text bodies.
• User defined equations on field contents, including conditional expressions.
• User configurable input parsing patterns (default is like awk).
• Include files.
• Environment variables.
• System variables.
• General purpose processing language.

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