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: 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.