Java text extraction and data structure design

Question

I have a huge set of data of tables in Open Office 3.0 document format.

   Table 1:
    (x range)|(x1,y1) |(x2,y2)|(x3,x3)|(x4,y4) 
    (-20,90) |(-20,0) |(-5,1) |(5,1)  |(10,0)
    ...

Like wise i have n number of tables.All of these tables are fuzzy set membership functions.In simple terms they are computational model's according to which i have to process the input data.There are many number of such tables with differing row size and column size 3/4 .These data's are not going to change once loaded.

Example: When i get a value of x in between the range -20 to 90.I will apply the first rule(given above).Suppose that it is -1(which is in between value of -20 and -5).Then I have to find a corresponding value between 0 and 1.

My First question is how to extract all the data from the tables in document format so that i can use in my java program.I know a bit of python and I know python can be useful in such cases.But then how to use it in my Java program.

Secondly what would be the best data structure i should use in such a senario.

Note: I'm not using any database.So i would prefer to keep the tables either in xml or some other format so that i can load it easily to the program.I also thinking of making a suitable data structure and then serializing them so that I can load them whenever required instead of parsing a file and recreating the data structure.Please post your comments.

Answer 1

In order to parse an OpenOffice Document in Java (to extract data), you can use a dedicated API such as ODFDOM. I think this solution is very complicated for what you need. A easier solution would be to extract manually the OpenOffice table, to put it in a format more friendly to parse in Java:

• CSV
• DataBase (MySQL, etc.)