scidCommunity Help: Pgnscid

# Pgnscid

Pgnscid is the separate program that you need to use to convert PGN (portable game notation) files into scidCommunity databases.

To convert a file named myfile.pgn, simply type:

- pgnscid myfile.pgn

and the scid database (consisting of myfile.si3, myfile.sg3 and myfile.sn3) will be created. Any errors or warnings will be written to the file myfile.err.

If you want the database to be created in a different directory or have a different name, you can add the database name to the command line, for example:

- pgnscid myfile.pgn mybase

will create a database consisting of the files mybase.si3, mybase.sg3 and mybase.sn3.

Note that pgnscid (and scid) can read Gzipped PGN files (e.g. mybase.pgn.gz) directly, so if you have a large PGN file compressed with Gzip to save disk space, you do not have to un-gzip it first.

### Options

There are two optional arguments pgnscid can accept before the filename: -f and -x.

The -f option forces overwriting of an existing database; by default, pgnscid will not convert to a database that already exists.

The -x option causes pgnscid to ignore all text between games. By default, text between games is stored as a pre-game comment of the game that follows. This option only affects text between games; standard comments inside each game are still converted and stored.

### Formatting player names

To reduce the number of multiple spellings of names that refer to the same player, some basic formatting of player names is done by pgnscid. For example, the number of spaces after each comma is standardized to one, any spaces at the start and end of a name are removed, and a dot at the end of a name is removed. Dutch prefixes such as "van den" and "Van Der" are also normalized to have a capital V and small d.

You can edit (and even spellcheck) player, event, site and round names in scidCommunity; see the Maintenance help page for details.

(Updated: scidCommunity, February 2026)