I used a utility program many years ago which did a similar thing. Given a flat file, it could parse each record and check each column met certain requirements.

The basic blocks were types, ranges and values.

Types were very basic ones such as:

• String
• Int
• Float
• Date

For some of these columns, ranges could be defined. For example, you could say that for a certain column, values 101-999 were valid values.

For more complex columns, you could define the valid values. E.g. for gender you might have:

• M
• F
• U

I used a utility program many years ago which did a similar thing. Given a flat file, it could parse each record and check each column met certain requirements.

The basic blocks were types, ranges and values.

Types were very basic ones such as:

• String
• Int
• Float
• Date

For some of these columns, ranges could be defined. For example, you could say that for a certain column, values 101-999 were valid values.

For more complex columns, you could define the valid values. E.g. for gender you might have:

• M
• F
• U

Simple but effective. We used it for all kinds of data files.