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Back in May, writer Jun Wu told in her blog how Perl excels at text manipulation. She often uses it to tidy data sets, a necessity as data is often collected with variations and cleaning it up before use is a necessity. She goes through many one-liners which help make that easy.
Having old reliables is my key to success. Ever since I learned Perl during the dot com bubble, I knew that I was forever beholden to its powers to transform.
You heard me. Freedom is the word here with Perl.
When I'm coding freely at home on my fun data science project, I rely on it to clean up my data.
In the real world, data is often collected with loads of variations. Unless you are using someone's "clean" dataset, you better learn to clean that data real fast.
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Perl Is Still The Goddess For Text Manipulation
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 19 2019, @03:37PM (5 children)
Kind of the point. Using perl you can do a whole hell of a lot in one line. I've used a lot of languages over the years and still pick new ones up for fun every year or two and I've never found anything even close to as versatile and efficient with text as perl. Python usually takes a minimum of three times as many lines to accomplish what perl can do legibly in one, five to ten is more common.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19 2019, @03:49PM (4 children)
Yeah, one-liners are good - I really appreciate having an easy GUI that I can just throw open a scrolling text box in, append text to it all day long with single line commands, HTML format that text if I feel like it, maybe toss on a few checkboxes to toggle boolean control variables (like command line switches, but changeable at runtime...)
Again, it's all in what you're used to. Today, I'm appreciating the verbose log files that make it relatively easy to spot what went weird when the testers come up with their 1/10,000 behaviors.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 19 2019, @03:57PM (3 children)
Honestly, I mostly use grep, awk, and sed for most one-liner type stuff. Perl is overkill for the extremely simple stuff. I mostly use it when I need something at least slightly more complex. The ability to get way more work done per readable line is just as useful in a script as on a command line though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @05:53AM (2 children)
I find grep and sed incredibly useful and intuitive, while never quite grokking awk. Don't know why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @08:57AM (1 child)
Because awk is for parsing of stuff, especially column oriented documents. If you want 5th column of something, for example. But if you don't deal with column data, then you probably would never need awk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @11:00AM
Awk is really good at stuff you would normally have to pipe sed and grep for, you can use one simple awk statement. It also has some formatting capabilities so I like to use it when writing shell functions.