TAFL archived files

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jmorgan123

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Hello,

TAFL files used to live here:

http://spectrum.ic.gc.ca/tafl/taflindex.html

However all files seem to have been removed (not sure when this happened). Does anyone have a copy of the last published files from approx Dec. 2015? There were 5 regional files and 5 contact/address files.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Jonathan
 

jwt873

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Things probably went awry when they changed "Industry Canada" to "Science and Economic Development Canada".. (Or whatever it's called this week :) )

You can access the TAFL to some extent through this page: --> Search Canada's TAFL

And I just found this Open Government Portal page that's a little different thant the one ScanPEI posted... http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset?q=tafl
 
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Jay911

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What you're looking for is now at the bottom of this page:

https://sms-sgs.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/sms-sgs-prod.nsf/eng/h_00010.html

But it's a complete disaster how it's made available now.

Good part: It is separated by air, land mobile, marine, etc, and updated at/near the first of each month.

Okay part: They are comma separated values files with structured fields, as described in the "Field Descriptions" link in proximity to the other links at the bottom of that page. A lot of the data fields are very useful/good-to-know items, too, that we've never had before in TAFL data.

Bad part: For some inexplicable reason, the first and last character of the location and/or licensee fields are stripped. So you get "HILLIWACK AIRPOR" and things like that.

Horrible part: A huge amount of the data fields contain commas within the text, and aren't escaped or encapsulated in "quotes so they are seen as text". So "Joe Smith Trucking, a division of 1076523 AB, Inc." is parsed as three fields because of the commas, when it should be one field - so everything else in that particular row will be offset by two fields.
 

Jay911

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You can access the TAFL to some extent through this page: --> Search Canada's TAFL

Take note that that is a private citizen who downloaded the data files the OP mentioned and created his own search engine, and it has not been updated since December 2015, so it is so profoundly out of date that it's next to useless (no offense to mckie).

The search indexes at this link used to work well, as in, for a few months up until the Christmas holidays - especially the geographical area search and the virtual license search (which I used almost daily). Since then, doing any search of any serious amount seems to crash the system, either generating a "500" error from the web service or reporting that "ic.gc.ca didn't send any data".

You'll probably have better luck walking up to someone and asking them directly what their radio frequencies are at this stage.
 

jwt873

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Take note that that is a private citizen who downloaded the data files the OP mentioned and created his own search engine, and it has not been updated since December 2015, so it is so profoundly out of date that it's next to useless (no offense to mckie)..

Thanks, good to know. I use that site occasionally,
 

AggieCon

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For the poorly done escaping and enclosing, perhaps try a find and replace:

find: ", "
Replace: ";"

That should get most of the rows lined up properly. However, it looks looks like some rows might be short a column. I don't know what to make of that.

Someone should tell them about pipe: |

Or they need to enclose the data in quotes.

If someone would like to teach me the details of all of these Canadian license databases, I sure would appreciate it.
 

jmorgan123

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Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

I should have mentioned that TAFL Search with Google Maps Output is my site, so I am familiar with the old and new formats of the files. I actually have a new version of the site ready to go that uses the new files, if they ever clean up the formatting and other issues. I can't switch over until the issues are resolved. From IC: "We are expecting the fix to be implemented before the end of January."

Yes, the current TAFL data is very out of date, but I do update the site with broadcast and spectrum license updates. During one of these updates, the TAFL data got a little messed up, but I unfortunately no longer have my backup of the last TAFL files, hence my request. It's not the end of the world if I can't track them down. Someone from the Open Data site is looking into why the files are 404 Not Found.

Thanks again!
 

AggieCon

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Please keep us updated with their responses and if they get everything together.

I was able to clean up the new files substantially, but still around 5% of the rows are going to be impossible to use without manual escaping, which I don't think I'm up for.
 

Jay911

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A new dump was made today and it looks much better than before. I downloaded the Land Mobile one and it is semicolon-delimited instead of comma-delimited. There are still some rows that end up screwed up due to semicolons used in descriptions etc., but I think AggieCon's search-and-replace idea would take care of most of it. That is, if you can find a text editor that will handle a 900MB file (Notepad++ won't, at least on any machine I have access to - but WordPad might cut it). There's also a curious situation where every ~2000 lines there's an extra carriage return. Can't eliminate that with WordPad I don't think (would be able to in Notepad++) but after you import to Excel, you should be able to highlight everything with Ctrl+A, then sort it, and that would at least move the blank lines to either the beginning or end.
 

jmorgan123

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A new dump was made today and it looks much better than before. I downloaded the Land Mobile one and it is semicolon-delimited instead of comma-delimited. There are still some rows that end up screwed up due to semicolons used in descriptions etc., but I think AggieCon's search-and-replace idea would take care of most of it. That is, if you can find a text editor that will handle a 900MB file (Notepad++ won't, at least on any machine I have access to - but WordPad might cut it). There's also a curious situation where every ~2000 lines there's an extra carriage return. Can't eliminate that with WordPad I don't think (would be able to in Notepad++) but after you import to Excel, you should be able to highlight everything with Ctrl+A, then sort it, and that would at least move the blank lines to either the beginning or end.

Am I blind, or is there still no licensee name in there?
 

Jay911

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Am I blind, or is there still no licensee name in there?

I noticed that after I posted. There are a very few records which have data in the licensee name field, and it's stuff like "Estevan Office" or "Attn: John Smith" which makes me think it's "line 2" of a two-line licensee name record, perhaps.
 
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