Feature Request: PGN file manipulation

[Dan]

It's quite easy to load games and analyze them in xboard, but I think it would be great to be able to filter the games by commonalities in the tags, such as rating, game length, time control, how the game ended (mate, flag, draw by 50, draw by repetition). And then be able to save the resulting list of games. This interests me in not just for normal chess, but for variants -- since there are _no_ variant database editors I can find.

Is it feasible?

[Dann Corbit]

Most chess database tools already do this.
Have you tried SCID?

[Dan]

I was looking for variant database management.
Suicide, loser's, atomic, etc.

[H.G.Muller]

It is already possible to filter the game list that is built from a PGN file that contains multiple games by tag. Just make sure the tags of interest are displayed in the game headers (through the Options -> Game List menu dialog), and then type the (combination of) tag(s) you want in the Filter field of the Game List window. Apart from PGN tags you can also select the game-result comment for display in the header line. (But not all games have such a message, and even if they have, it might not be standardized.)

In WinBoard there is a command to save the (filtered) game list. But I see that the corresponding menu item in XBoard is missing. This might just be an oversight, as printing the tags seems a pure back-end function. So this should be easy to fix.

I don't know if that covers all information you need. What is currently not possible is to save the games themselves, or analyze them in bulk for the way they ended, if they did not yet contain result comments.