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Subject: Is there a free program to save writing a program to read pgn

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 01:26:11 05/13/04


I understand that many free programs read pgn in order to generate their book.
I did not start the task of writing a program to read pgn but the task of
getting information about the next move is the same task and I do not like
to work only to do the same thing that other programmers did.

My question is if there is a free program with source code that can help here.


My idea is that there can be a free program with source that simply read the pgn
and use some simple functions that are easy to program assuming that you already
have functions to generate list of legal moves and to make moves.

The free program does not need to know the chess rules and it can use the chess
program.

I think that having the list of legal moves as an array of strings including the
name of the moving piece if it is not a pawn is a relatively simple task to
reading pgn.
The array can include in the opening position 20 strings:
"a2a3 a2a4 b2b3 b2b4...Nb1a3 Nb1c3 Ng1f3 Ng1h3"


Now the free function with source code that read pgn should get pgn and
translate it to a file with hash key,move(full notation),num_game information
and a different file that have information about every game.

The free function does not need to know chess and can simply use functions
to get the hash key or get the list of possible moves or make move from the
chess program.

It will also detect cases when there are illegal moves in the pgn or moves that
are not clear like Nd2 when it is not clear if it is Nbd2 or Nfd2.

Most programmers may get the right to use it in the same way that they can get
the right to use the nalimov tablebases.

Uri



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