I wrote a small (~300 line) C program to scrape an email and insert the part I wanted into a Postgres database. I used PCRE for the extraction and ECPG for the

I wrote a small (~300 line) C program to scrape an email and insert the part I wanted into a Postgres database. I used PCRE for the extraction and ECPG for the Postgres part. ECPG stands for embedded SQL in C for Postgres, and it looks like this: // Open the storage subsystem. void open_storage() { EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION; const char* database = DATABASE_NAME; const char* username = USERNAME; const char* schema = SCHEMA; EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION; EXEC SQL WHENEVER SQLERROR CALL quit(); EXEC SQL CONNECT TO :database USER :username; EXEC SQL SET search_path to :schema; } ECPG: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html My takeaway was that it was a lot easier than I expected, but it was still kind of a minefield. ECPG isn't widely used or highly intelligent, so there are a lot of stumbling blocks despite the pretty high quality documentation. I would recommend hiding your ECPG behind some functions so you only have to run some of your files through the pre-processor. But it is a neat tool and I could see myself using it again.