I've been using Perl a great deal recently for reasonably large projects (eg perl simplifies catalog production) spanning weeks or months... OO, modules, POD, all the heavy equipment of Perl. Been in the mindset of big perl programs.

Today I received a data file from another firm... a text file in a pretty ugly format: one line per order, followed by a line for each item on the order (so a variable number of lines per order), using a strange datetime format ("Wed 20 Aug 08:05:16 2000"), embedded commas and dollar signs in the money fields... delimited by spaces -- and of course the description field also contained internal spaces... simply yuck.

A few lines of perl and ... whoooomph! ... the data are clean, normalized, and happily sitting in a database.

Clearly preaching to the choir here, but damn, Perl sure makes parsing tasks easy...

In reply to good ol' text parsing... by nop

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