I apologize for the long background story, but my project is a tad esoteric.
Technical data on individual stars are difficult to find, and what searchable databases I've found are geared more towards astronomers than lay people. At the same time, large catalogues of stars are freely available on the web as text files.
My project involves two scripts. The first script will mine the data out of these text files, generate some derived data like a 3D Cartesian coordinate (x, y, z), and combine it all into one (probably CSV) text file. The second script, naturally, will be a script to search the combined file based on user-provided criteria. I will also be setting up several presets for search criteria, such as for particularly Sun-like stars. The catch is that my programming skills are very rudimentary.
At the moment, what I have is a script that converts one of the files into CSV (the original format being character columns, e.g. column 1--4 is the catalog ID number, column 5--10 the type, etc.), a second script that does the mining and generation of the "combined file", and a script that lets the user input the ID number of a star, a distance, and "1" if they want to filter for Sun-like stars, and generates an unsorted file with all (or just Sun-like) stars within the specified distance of the target.
One big gap in my knowledge is efficient search methods, both for the search script itself and when building the combined file (checking to see if a given star is already in the combined file). Another is how to insert a new line to a file without having to rewrite the entire file (also for adding additional catalogue data to the combined file). A third, somewhat related, gap is how to sort the output from searches. Finally, I suspect there's a way to process the original files directly, without having to convert them all to CSV first (the main problem being how to handle the whitespace used to make the columns neat).
I've done some googling, but haven't found anything online (I recently moved to Argentina, so I can't just go out and buy a book), so I'm asking as much for pointers to tutorials and instructions as I am direct suggestions on how to do things.
Thanks in advance for your help.