[doclands]

Hi guys

Is there a bpn to lin file converter? I have scoured the net but failed, with the exception of a DOS based programme.

I have a programme for generating hands with the parameters I need - 100 hands instantly with fanunes opening bid etc. etc. great ! but I wrote it to produce a final pbn file. If I want to use handsets for teaching purposes or bidding practice purposes on BBO I need to be able to change them into lin format.

Any help appreciated. I suppose I could write a programme to do this as well but the format is quite messy, so no point in re-inventing the wheel if someone has already done it


Cheers

doclands

[shyams]

doclands, on Aug 29 2010, 07:51 PM, said:

Is there a bpn to lin file converter?  I have scoured the net but failed, with the exception of a DOS based programme.

If this DOS based program you refer to was found on rpbridge.net, then I think you should use it anyway. It works wonderfully well and can be found here

[inquiry]

the netbridgevu program the marjority of us use, will convert pbn files to lin files just fine. This is the non-flash thing. If you use flash, you can still download netbridgevu at the following link (click the download our software)

http://online.bridgebase.com/intro/install...ide_for_bbo.php

When you get the program installed on your computers (odd are high it is already installed now), open it (the name is netbridgevu.exe if you need to search your computer for it). when you start the program, rather than clicking the large "Log in" button, look for the much smaller button on the bottom left hand side of the window that says "Open bridge movie from your computer".

Click on that open bridge movie button, find the pbn file you are looking for and click it. The program will open the file and save a LIN file with the same name but with the lin extension in the same directory in which the pbn file is located.

[doclands]

Thanks inquiry, I looked at that and can load a pbn but no way to save it - or am I missing something?

[inquiry]

doclands, on Aug 29 2010, 06:03 PM, said:

Thanks inquiry, I looked at that and can load a pbn but no way to save it - or am I missing something?

It automatically saves a file...

Say you loaded from c:/documents/test.pbn into the program, that file remains unchanged, but if you look in c:/documents/ you will now find a new file,
C:/documents/test.lin

any pbn file you open will create and save a file with the exact same name, but with the lin extension.

[doclands]

Many thanks inquiry - problem solved!

[BudH]

inquiry, on 2010-August-29, 13:30, said:

the netbridgevu program the marjority of us use, will convert pbn files to lin files just fine. This is the non-flash thing. If you use flash, you can still download netbridgevu at the following link (click the download our software)

http://online.bridgebase.com/intro/install...ide_for_bbo.php

When you get the program installed on your computers (odd are high it is already installed now), open it (the name is netbridgevu.exe if you need to search your computer for it). when you start the program, rather than clicking the large "Log in" button, look for the much smaller button on the bottom left hand side of the window that says "Open bridge movie from your computer".

Click on that open bridge movie button, find the pbn file you are looking for and click it. The program will open the file and save a LIN file with the same name but with the lin extension in the same directory in which the pbn file is located.

Realizing it is a few years since inquiry wrote his instructions above.....

I'm trying to find an easy way to transform a PBN file into a text file and am willing to put up with making it a LIN file first and then using LinConverter to make it a text file.

I started BBO's software and clicked "Open Bridge Movie from your computer" without logging in. Then I opened a PBN file that contains 33 deals. But when it opened the PBN file, it showed ONLY Board 33 (the last deal) and I couldn't see any other deal. And the LIN file was a tiny 1 KB in size and contained only that last deal for Board 33.

Any idea why only the last deal and not all deals are being shown or made available for viewing when opening the PBN file?

Bud H

[FM75]

BudH, on 2013-February-10, 10:59, said:

Realizing it is a few years since inquiry wrote his instructions above.....

I'm trying to find an easy way to transform a PBN file into a text file and am willing to put up with making it a LIN file first and then using LinConverter to make it a text file.

I started BBO's software and clicked "Open Bridge Movie from your computer" without logging in. Then I opened a PBN file that contains 33 deals. But when it opened the PBN file, it showed ONLY Board 33 (the last deal) and I couldn't see any other deal. And the LIN file was a tiny 1 KB in size and contained only that last deal for Board 33.

Any idea why only the last deal and not all deals are being shown or made available for viewing when opening the PBN file?

Bud H

PBN file (and lin files) are really just text files. You can open the pbn file with notepad, or wordpad, and just create n separate files, one line per file.

[Narra Nhoj]

I have just tried running Richard Pavlicek's converter program on a Windows 8.1 machine. It is a real PITA as it has to be run under the DosBox utility, but does appear to work. I doubt if anyone who is even slightly computer phobic would be able to achieve a result. I have been programming computers for nearly 50 years (I started programming Elliot Autocode in 1965!) and had some difficulty getting it working.

The output files will upload to BBO but can't be played on a teaching table coming back with a message that they are damaged in some way. It really is time there was an online converter page to achieve this task. I am quite happy to write one and have a full understanding of how the PBN file format works, but have no information about the LIN format which is proprietary to BBO. If the LIN format was available publicly the task is a really simple one as both formats are just text files.

Can anyone offer an insight to the workings of the LIN file?

[Narra Nhoj]

Anyone???

[Narra Nhoj]

For anyone who wishes to use BBO for teaching and can only get access to .pbn files there is now an online converter page here:

http://johnfromarran...e/PbnToLin.html

Enjoy.

[Narra Nhoj]

There were two noticable bugs in version 1. The main one was that file names containing either '#' or multiple periods were getting truncate and causing the download to fail. The second one was that the converted file could only be downloaded once. Both these have now been fixed.

If anyone finds any more bugs please let me know.

[Narra Nhoj]

If your club has a website on Bridgewebs, you will now be able to download deal files directly in LIN format for uploading to BBO. This has been incorporated into the latest revision 2.19f which was released yesterday

[Narra Nhoj]

Another bug has surfaced in that someone was trying to convert files with names containing the "+" symbol. This causes problems with the php download code and has now been fixed. If the "+" symbol is contained within a filename it will now be converted to "_". This is in addition to the " ", "!" and "#" symbols which were found to cause a problem earlier.

[Narra Nhoj]

Yet another bug has appeared recently where someone was trying to convert a file with a comma in the name. This has now been fixed.

All of the following characters will be deleted from the name of any submitted file:

<SPACE> ! ' # , and +

Also if, after deletion of the offending characters, the resultant file name is empty a dummy name will be created using the local (London) date and time of the file submission.

I hope it works for you.

[Narra Nhoj]

A few more errors have been noticed since the last update in August and it was down to file names containing the "&" character. This has now been fixed.

Also, a lot of work has been done on detecting format errors in the submitted PBN files. Instead of crashing the site, files with errors should now be flagged together with an indication of which line contains the error.

I hope it works for you.

[Narra Nhoj]

Latest update 2017-01-15:

Users may not realise that all converted files older than 1 hour are automatically deleted when a file conversion is performed. Some users seem to have been leaving a browser window open and attempting to download a converted file after it has been deleted, which may have been slightly disconcerting. This will now be flagged as an error.

[Narra Nhoj]

It's two-and-a-half years since I posted the first version of the converter and, to date, there have been nearly 1100 conversions. I hope it has served you well.

[wbartley]

Narra Nhoj, on 2017-March-25, 16:32, said:

It's two-and-a-half years since I posted the first version of the converter and, to date, there have been nearly 1100 conversions. I hope it has served you well.

Thank you for the web page. I have two questions.

1. Did you work from some sort of specification or did you reverse engineer LIN format from examples?

2. If you don't have a .LIN specification, would you be willing to publish the server side code that does the conversion so that I can streamline the creation of pbn output and conversion to lin format in a different program?

[y66]

fyi: Paul Bethe's lin2pbn python program is useful for understanding the structure of lin files.

Search paul+bethe+lin2pbn.py