@ an ordinary chessplayer

Thank for this, AOC, and sorry I didn’t say so earlier – a case of POW, nay, mega-POW …

I don’t know if it helps comprehension of my earlier last sentence to say that in CB 8.0 the ChessX association is created if I select pgn, but if I select ‘text’, I do get a text file, in Notepad.

Re your ‘Simplest’ solution’, that box was already checked. Re the other solution: the ‘Always open with the selected program’ device appears to work, but when I try to export from SCID, even if I’ve selected only two or three games I get ‘File too big’ messages for both Notepad and MS Word, with the latter saying file is larger than 512 MB (2,358,526 KB)!

Sure, so many ways to do it. Here's one:

• Double-click help.txt file to open it in notepad.
• On the menu click File ! Save As...
• In the File name box change help (or help.txt) to "help.html" - use double-quotes in the new name - very important!
• Click Save

note (1) If you have your view options set to the default Hide extensions for known file types, then the box says help. If you changed that setting, the box says help.txt.

note (2) Using double-quotes tells Windows "exactly what I typed". Otherwise it will add .txt to the end and typing help.html (without quotes) will give you help.html.txt. And if your extensions are hidden, you will see help.html but it's not really an .html file.

Michael Ayton wrote on 04/25/21 at 11:19:41:

I was with you right up until this last part, but this doesn't match the other information you gave. I was thinking you have Windows set for the default "Hide file extensions for known types", and ChessX has associated .pgn files with itself. So when you say ChessX file, that would be the same as pgn file. Then you threw this last sentence in, which is totally inconsistent with my mental model.

Usually when you install a new program, there is a checkbox in Setup which says "Register file type", and you uncheck that box if you have some other preferred program already registered to the file type. So if you installed ChessX after ChessBase and didn't uncheck the box, that explains how ChessX messed up your file association.

Simplest: In ChessBase, click Tools ! Options ! Misc, check the box for Register PGN, click OK.

Other programs may have a similar menu option for capturing the file type.

More complicated: In Windows Explorer, click Tools ! Folder Options ! View, scroll down the list and uncheck the box Hide file extensions for known types, click OK. You can change it back later if it bothers you. Then find a .pgn file. Right-click, choose Open With, click Choose... If you don't see the one you want, in older Windows click Browse and find the .exe wherever it might be, in newer Windows click the shy down-arrow to show all the programs installed. Once your favorite program is selected, check the box Always open with the selected program, click OK.

For myself, I associate .pgn with notepad++ (great text editor on Windows). In notepad++ if you tell it .pgn is a pascal (or ada, etc.) source file then it will even do some nice color syntax highlighting for you. Or if notepad++ is not available (not my PC for example), I use notepad (not great but guaranteed to be available). If I want to open a pgn in a chess program (could be a different program every time), I can open that program first and then use Open from the menu. I don't like MS Word or similar for text files because it/they may insert formatting which I don't want.

Follow-up,

No probs D/L'ing SCID. But, no surprise, the documentation is extensive. It would be huge if I could find a copy of the Help File I could download as a separate .pdf or even .txt file. My resources are a desktop PC and a kindle. I have an Android phone but that is NOT for reading large help files ( at least in my universe). I do most non-print reading off the kindle as it is convenient (chair or bed). I see there is plenty of You-Tube and web-based resources. Is there a way to get the Help file as a separate .pdf for download to my kindle (I can drag n drop it from PC to kindle)? I looked and haven't found even a separate .txt copy of it.

TIA,
Cathexis

@Jupp53 - I know you use Scid, just like you know I use the command line.

The ability to handle huge databases is where Scid shines. According to Fulvio Benini, the most recent maintainer of Scid, this is Shane Hudson's genius to make a database format that is so fast when opening and working with huge databases. Since Fulvio is familiar with the codebase, I take his word on that. The same 550MB .pgn file that locked up my computer trying to open in a text editor, Scid opened and converted to .si4 format in 14 seconds. I just checked, since it is now in Scid format, the same database re-opens in less than one second.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 04/24/21 at 19:07:38:

Right, I made two mistakes. (a) Putting Rated in the first box + Classical in the second box was finding games with Classical in the Opening tag. (b) We can't find Rapid and Classical in one OR filter, we need two separate filter operations.

So to correctly filter the way Jupp53 requested, in Scid

• Search ! Header
• White Rating = 2400 - 4000
• Black Rating = 2400 - 4000
• PGN contains text = "Rated Rapid" (all in the first box)
• Operation on current filter = IGNORE (Reset filter)
• Search - I got 8,314 / 604K
• In the Database Switcher drag and drop from lichess_elite_2020_03 to the <clipbase>
• In the Game List, click Change_filter (2nd button)
• Click Reset (1st button)
• Search ! Header
• leave the Rating fields the same
• PGN contains text = "Rated Classical" (all in the first box)
• Operation on current filter = IGNORE (Reset filter)
• Search - I got 117 / 604K
• In the Database Switcher drag and drop from lichess_elite_2020_03 to the <clipbase>

Now the clipbase has 8,431 games, which seems correct.

@cathexis - You should investigate Scid. It's free! And it's the best at handling huge databases. But the user interface is not really that nice. So you could use it as a filter: Import a huge database, filter like I showed above, export a smaller database, then open the small database in your preferred ChessBase Reader 2017 and/or Fritz. I often use Scid in exactly this way, except my preferences are HIARCS Chess Explorer on macOS, Chess Studio on iPad, Wine+Chess Assistant on Linux, and (rarely) ChessBase on Windows.

Jupp53 said no command line because otherwise I would have suggested it.

First, my statistics were wrong. My guesstimate was correct, but I confused myself by how I did my guesstimate. It's "only" 600K games per month at the moment, only 2x in the past year. Still I had to use the command line to investigate the March 2021 elite database. I tried to open it in a GUI text editor and it froze my system. 8GB RAM is not enough for a 552.5MB text file, apparently.

Second, the database already excludes bullet games.

The Event tag contains the following values:

• Rated Blitz game 
• Rated Blitz tournament https://lichess.org/tournament/02Ns4t6x (but the key at the end varies by tournament)
• Rated Classical game
• Rated Classical tournament https://lichess.org/tournament/C3m2Wwu5
• Rated Rapid game
• Rated Rapid tournament https://lichess.org/tournament/05TwEPY0

So to filter the way Jupp53 requested, in Scid

• Search ! Header
• White Rating = 2400 - 4000
• Black Rating = 2400 - 4000
• PGN contains text = Rated + Rapid
• Operation on current filter = IGNORE (Reset filter)
• Search (New Filter) - I got 8,314 / 604K
• leave the Rating fields the same
• PGN contains text = Rated + Classical
• Operation on current filter = OR (Add to filter)
• Search - I got 24,600

Now you could copy those games to the Clipbase, add them to a new "2400RapidClassical" database, etc. Of course you could change the filter settings in other ways depending on your needs. What I couldn't figure out how to do in Scid is delete all the games in the current filter. There may be a way, but it's not in the menu, nor could I discover it by right-clicking.

If anybody is dreaming of importing the data from lichess.org instead of from database.nikonoel.fr, you are sure to run into some problems no matter what database you use. For example:
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