use Perl

I made a first step at above module (see my last journal entry) by implementing what I need myself :). The problem is, that I'm really not the right guy for the job - I didn't even know how to use sprintf until yesterday. DTAUS as a format really sucks. I guess the decision not to use line feed and/or carriage return for record separation was made for interoperability, but I think they should as least have made them optional, so that my shell doesn't scream at me all day.

Python and PHP both have DTAUS implementation. The PHP one, however, doesn't have documentation and the python implementation uses CSV-Files as it's API. There is a nice Ruby implementation, though. I think I'll steal it's API.

The API is a tough thing anyway. The first question that arises is whether to use english or german words since the format is solely used in the German banking system and it is sometimes hard to find exact english translations for all the special words.

Ah, well, back to work