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.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 19 2019, @03:52PM (2 children)
Perl's kind of shitty at that too unless you know the few simple tricks to make it not shitty at it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @03:20AM (1 child)
Really? Perl was the first language to manage that properly for me. Yeah, sometimes you need to be explicit in unusual ways, but at least you _can_ without jumping through hoops. I think this gets thrown in the "tricks" category just because it so rarely comes up that you're probably going to need to look it up when it does, cuz otherwise you just pick an encoding and forget about it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 20 2019, @03:26AM
Yup. There are even changes involving unicode jumping hoops in perl since I bitchslapped SN into more or less supporting it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.