Elections 2003
Conversion Information &
Disc Download
Below is the text from the !ReadMeIW file on the Elections 2003 disc. The disc is available below as an ADFS "L" disc image.
ELECTIONS 2003
This disc contains all the BBC Ceefax election results pages (700-792) plus some of the main news pages (100-109). It took about four hours with my Teletext Adapter to download all the pages on Friday 2nd May 2003.
Once I had all the pages on disc, I set about creating a menu system to navigate through the pages as if you were viewing them on a television set. The advantage of this is that individual pages of multi-page teletext pages (almost all of the results pages) can be viewed on demand using the left and right arrows.
The menu programme loads all sheets of multi-pages into memory when a new page is selected and shows page 1 first. This speeds up the viewing of multi-pages.
I then devised programmes to extract the data contained in the teletext pages into a raw text format. The programme "ConvertSW" extracts all the results from the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections (pages 707-721 and 736-743) into a new file. This takes about 15 minutes to do both Scotland and Wales.
The programme "ConvertLoc" converts the local elections results pages (759-792) into raw text format. This takes about half-an-hour.
If I had more time I could have put the data extraction routine into machine code or even run the BASIC programme across the Tube to save time.
I used the resultant text files to produce the Individual Results pages on my Website.
I extracted the data for the summary pages manually. I did this by loading each of the relevant pages into Inter-Word using the Load Text at Cursor option. In the case of the Scotland and Wales summary sheets, I cut out as much of the control codes as possible and then spooled the files for transfer to my PC where I did the rest.
With the local elections summary, I was able to clean up the text sufficiently in Inter-Word to save it as a raw text file using my Inter-Word Converter to transfer it to my PC and convert it into HTML.
The following files are on this disc:
| !BOOT | The boot file which auto-runs the menu |
| !ReadMeIW | This file, in Inter-Word format |
| !ReadMeTxt | This file, in raw text format |
| ConvertLoc | A BASIC programme to convert the local council results pages into a raw text format |
| ConvertSW | A BASIC programme to convert the Scotland and Wales election results pages into raw text format |
| L-SummIW | Local elections summary data in Inter-Word format |
| L-SummTxt | Local elections summary data in raw text format |
| LocText | A file created with "ConvertLoc" |
| Menu | A BASIC navigation system for all the teletext pages stored on this disc |
| S-spool | The file "ScotSumm" spooled by Inter-Word |
| ScotSumm | An Inter-Word file containing partly cleaned data from the summary pages relating to Scotland |
| SWText | A file created with "ConvertSW" |
| W-spool | The file "WalesSumm" spooled by Inter-Word |
| WalesSumm | An Inter-Word file containing partly cleaned data from the summary pages relating to Wales |
| LOCALS | The main directory of teletext pages 750-792, held in 5 lettered subdirectories |
| NEWS | The main directory of teletext pages 101-109 |
| SCOT/WALES | The main directory of teletext pages 700-749, held in 5 lettered subdirectories |
All the pages from Teletext contained on this disc are © British Broadcasting Corporation 2003
The menu system, conversion programmes and this text are © Ian Wolstenholme 2003
ISW 5/v/2003
Click here to download the Elections 2003 disc image (189KB Zip file)
E-mail me if you can't get it to work!