INSTRUCTIONS FOR RUNNING NewNexisFilter.pl

DOWNLOADING FROM NEXIS

Run the appropriate search in LexisNexis, and then use the "Download Documents" option (the icon that quaintly looks like a disk -- remember those, before we had flash drives?). Use "Select Items" in the "Document Range" box to download a maximum of 500 stories at a time. In addition, the program assumes the following options have been selected for downloading:

  Format: text
  Document View: Full document
  Font: Courier

No additional options should be checked.  You can increase the efficiency by eliminating sports stories and news summaries: these will be skipped anyway.

Note that the program is currently set up only to filter for Agence France Presse stories.

RUNNING THE FILTER

1. Put all of the Nexis files you intend to filter and the following two programs in a folder:

	NewNexisFormat.pl
	nexisreverse.pl

2. In the Terminal (command-line), move to that folder

3. Assuming your Nexis downloads have a file name of the form

	Agence_France_Presse_-_English2007-09-14_16-31.TXT

enter the command

	ls Agence_Fr* > format.files

Alternatively, just use the command

	ls > format.files

and manually edit out all of the files that are not downloaded files

4. Enter the command

	perl NewNexisFormat.pl <prefix>

where <prefix> is the prefix for the formatted file. For example

	perl NewNexisFormat.pl AFPLVT

5. Program should run, with the dates and headlines of the various stories scrolling past as they are processed. If the program stops working -- crashes or stops responding -- the last story displayed (or the one following it) is probably the cause, so just eliminate that story and try running the program again.

6. When the program has finished, enter the command

	ls <prefix>* > filelist

where <prefix> is the prefix you entered earlier. For example

	ls AFPLVT* > filelist

7. Enter the command

	perl nexisreverse.pl

8. The resulting TABARI input files are in the file 

	reverse.output

which can be renamed at this point, and a summary of the number of entries in this file can be found in

	filelist.summary

Note that as currency configured, nexisreverse.pl only gets the first sentence of the story.

Programmer: Philip A. Schrodt (schrodt@ku.edu)
Last Update: 22 March 2008