PokerTracker

Full Tilt sent me an Excel spreadsheet with tournament results, which I saved as a csv file. There's one row per tournament. The fields (columns) they give you are:

Tournament ID
Tournament Name
Tournament Start *
Tournament End *
Description
Buy-In
Buy-In Date/Time *
Addons
Rebuys
Eliminated *
Position
Payout Amount
Total Bounty

* date fields in dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm format

I'm a perl programmer so I can reformat this data pretty easily to something that can be automatically imported by PT3. Is there a canonical tournament results format you can handle?

If not, then for each tournament I can write out something that looks like their summary .txt files, but I'll be missing some data: Buy-In Chips, number of entries, total prize pool, and results and payouts of other players. Is PT3's tournament summary importer robust enough to handle missing data? I'm willing to give this a shot but I don't want to hose my db.

Any suggestions?

Firstly, you won't break your database by trying this - if you don't get the correct format for the hand history file then PT3 won't import it.
However - it would be sensible to back up your database first just in case you import incorrect data and want to revert.
See the Database / Postgres FAQ.

I'm not familiar with the structure of the Full Tilt summary files (which FT writes as you play a tournament) but you should be able to work out how to format your information.

Ok, in looking into this a bit more I see that the amount of Knockout Bounties for FTP are not included in the "amount won" field in PT3. This can be significant when it comes to tracking tourney results. It's been mentioned here in the forums a number of times and a fix has been promised, though not soon.

So in addition to creating summary results .txt files from the excel results sent by FTP, I could also munge up all my saved real summary files and change the amount won line to include bounties, and then reimport the summary results files. But I'd like to keep a note in the summary file to the effect of what I'm doing -- a comment field in effect -- so that when PT3 can properly handle knockout bounties I can undo what I did and re-reimport. Is there a standard way to tell the PT3 importer that a line is a comment? A line starting with a '#' or a '!', for example.

I would suggest that the best way to do this might be to make 2 copies of the summary file - one with your changes and one 'plain' file.
I don't know of a way to comment out lines - if PT3 doesn't understand a line I guess it won't read it, but then that might that the whole file can't be read..