I have used AWK for quite a while now. It is language
designed for quick parsing and formatting for text
files. It was perhaps the first true programming
language catered for text manipulation. Anyway once
you learn it you would always used it for text
manipulation since is it quick to use for text
applications. Yes it is more readable compared to
PERL..... Still PERL can do a lot more than text
manipulation.

John

PS: AWK takes a bit of time *maybe a month* to fully
understand the capabilitiy of the program. 

I do recommend this book.
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/index.html


--- Marcel Birthelmer <marcelb.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Specifically for CSV parsing, I quite like awk. It's
> a very "mature"
> product/language of course, but the syntax is
> basically C with some
> perl-style declarations.
> As for general-purpose text parsing, Perl is nice,
> but the fact that
> it's pretty unmaintainable, even with good comments,
> makes it much
> less useful in the long run. I haven't used python's
> regex abilities
> yet, but that's probably where I would check first
> these days.
> Rgds,
> - Marcel
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