CC-CEDICT dictionary convert to excel

[chinesemadrush]

Hi everyone,

 

CC-CEDICT is a dictionary which you can search for words in. It is available in a text file here (https://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=cedict)

 

Unfortunately, I do not know how to parse the text file into nice columns in Excel. Does anyone know how to do this?

 

I am aware that Excel has a text to column function but it doesn't seem advanced enough for the file structure used by CC-CEDICT

 

Thanks,

Kevin

[iand]

I'm pretty sure it's just tab (tab-separated values).

[iand]

That should have read tsv

[Yadang]

Yeah, it should be tsv, but upon importing it to excel, it looks like it's delimited by space, which is problematic... You could probably write a function to delimit it based on when the pinyin starts (which is enclosed in brackets)... Let me know if you need help.

[imron]

It's not tsv.  The format is specified here.

 

Do you have access to an editor that handles regular expressions?  If not, download notepad++.

 

Then open the CC-CEDICT file.

 

Then Search->Replace (Ctrl+H)

 

Set the 'Search Mode' to 'Regular expression'.

 

In the 'Find what' field type: ^([^ ]+) ([^ ]+) (\[.*\]) (.*)$

(probably best to copy/paste this from this post).

 

This is a regular expression that matches 4 fields - Traditional, Simplified, Pinyin, Definition

 

In the 'Replace with' field type

 

\1\t\2\t\3\t\4

 

This replaces each matching line with the individual fields separated by a tab character.

 

Then hit Replace All and wait 10-20 seconds and you should be good to go.  Just save the file and import it directly in to excel.

[chinesemadrush]

Thanks Imron would try it out later!