I have to say, this is one area where Perl is really amazing. I can recall several times when some regexes and the sheer ease of creating code in perl allowed me to parse formats that other people looked at and gave up on. Excel files with columns that kept moving around, multiple values that mean the same thing, and even mis-spelled names that were supposed to match (String::Approx!). The Java programmers I was working with would never have managed it.