E-bill Analysis

Psychedelik

I am a UTV Talk customer and anyone who's familiar with the service will know about their monthly e-bills. These are available online and show a full itemisation of calls.

You can copy and paste the text into plain text which could be interpreted easily by software. I'd like to do some analysis on my calls such as most frequently dialled numbers, savings with UTV Talk etc.

I am an absolute beginner when it comes to programming. Could anyone give me tips on what language and programming aids to use?

Thanks all.

Syth

I would recommend Perl. You want to do some text processing, which perl is good at. There should be lots of info on the web about learning perl. If you're using a Unix OS then your probably already have perl installed. If you're using windows you can download it from a group called activestate, just search for activestate perl. If you have prior programming experience then you'll pick it up faster than if you had no programming exprience.

If you stick with it you can get your prgramme to automatically download the data off the webpage.

NotMe

Let us know how you get on. I always copy the bill into a spreadsheet program and add up the totals for each number etc.. It would be handy to have a program to do it.

amen

if you post a sample file or text and what you expect for results I'll try an do a little proggy if i get the time

Psychedelik

Thanks for your advice. See the attachment for a sample bill.

See what you can do, I will aswell. As you might know, local and national calls at certain times are free with UTV Talk. It'd be handy to calculate the saving made from UTV Talk as opposed to getting charged normally.

The usuals like most frequently dialled, most expensive, totals for mobile calls etc. What would be very handy also is a feature that would emulate the rates of Eircom or BT, and calculate a total for them. Comparing bills (graphs) over months and years would be useful.

Anyway, whatever you can do and have time for, it will be appreciated Amen!