Split pgn files by players

Question

Is there a way to split large PGN files into folders grouped by the players? For example, in a tournament, each player has several games in one file. I aim to group each game by players to the respective folders (one game, one file). So it will produce two files for each match, one for player 1 and one for player 2 in two separate folders.

Answer 1

Either you may be able to do it in a DB manager (ChessBase...) or you'll need a bit of coding in Chess Query Language

---

Download and extract cqli (a modern rewrite of the original cql software) to the folder containing your pgn database

Create a p1.cql file, with the following content (this is an example for getting all Kasparov's games) :

cql(input database.pgn)

"Kasparov" in player

---

Open Powershell/Terminal (depending on your platform), cd to the database directory and run

Unix/Linux

./cqli --threads 8 p1.cql

macOS

# For Intel Macs
./cqli-x86_64 --threads 8 p1.cql
# For Apple Silicon Macs
./cqli-arm64 --threads 8 p1.cql

Windows

./cqli.exe --threads 8 p1.cql

---

And you'll find the resulting database in p1-out.pgn.

Note that it is a database, to extract it, we can use kentdjb pgn-extract

Unzip the windows executable in the database program as previously, or build it from source if you are on Linux/macOS

And then run :

./pgn-extract -\#1 p1-out.pgn

The backslash before the # is essential

This will split your pgn into files named 1.pgn, 2.pgn...