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The Awk Programming Language

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Re: The Awk Programming Language

#51

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Woeps wrote: post #44
joeythedolphin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl? Wow. Is that better than bash, python or even nodejs? Why write in Perl over these? Serious question, was propaghandized to hate Perl.

Perl better? maybe or maybe not. It can be very useful and they are pretty robust. I often found Perl scripts running for years and years without issues at different companies. My main issue with Perl-scripts is that they often are not "readable" by anybody but the original creator. Which of course left the company. (not a fault of Perl itself tough) But your millage may vary and any script can be made (un)readable.

>> My main issue with Perl-scripts is that they often are not "readable" by anybody but the original creator.

Anyone writing Perl scripts like this should not be trusted with any programming language.

Perl scripts are no less readable than bash scripts or Awk scripts. This is because so much of Perl was written to do the same work as bash, awk, sed, and the other related Unix text processing command line programs, but all under one roof.

Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself:

https://learn.perl.org/

http://blob.perl.org/books/impatient-perl/iperl.htm

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#52

Post by galleywest200 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #50
benhoyt wrote: post #25

I was privileged to be one of the technical reviewers for this book. There's a fair bit of the original content (which is still great), but Kernighan's done a great job with some good restructuring and some significant updates, too. The early chapters are very hands-on, with something of a focus on "exploratory data processing", particularly with CSV files. Big data with AWK, you could say. Gawk and awk will soon hav…

Its a crying shame we never settled on a control character separated text format. There's a ascii control characters for record and field (unit) separators. A bit of user space support for that would have been great.

It is a shame. I have been using tab-separated sheets recently as it allows me to simply not care about almost any possible character in my strings...apart from tabs of course. But those are far less common than commas, and putting strings in quotes 100% of the time looks messy to me.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#53

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

joeythedolphin wrote: post #28
kqr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I moved from AWK to Perl for these quick jobs a couple of years ago. If you stick to an AWK-like subset, Perl is also simple, fast and lightweight. If you want to grow your scripts (and you have a lot of discipline) Perl – in contrast to AWK – gives you enough noose to hang^W^W^W^Wthe tools you need.

Perl? Wow. Is that better than bash, python or even nodejs? Why write in Perl over these? Serious question, was propaghandized to hate Perl.

Have you ever tried to dig a hole? What tool did you use?

- Want to cut through and move loam, compost, sandy, and compacted soil? You're gonna want a rounded shovel.

- Want to break up rocky, clay soil? A pick mattock will penetrate deep, breaking up soil, shattering smaller rocks, and is used as a lever to uproot. A tiller is a faster method but disturbs the soil more.

- Want to dig a narrow, deep hole? An augur will quickly break up rocks and soil in a shaft and move them upwards.

What do you use the Perl tool for?

- Quickly and efficiently open files, read line by line, analyze text, and perform any kind of operation you can think of, with complex data structures, objects and modular code, using very few lines of code.

- Executing external commands with a shell, returning their output, and making complex yet short programs easily with arguments to the interpreter from a command line.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#54

Post by coliveira »

donatj wrote: post #15

I love awk. It’s everywhere and every time I am writing a shell script and work myself into a corner, awk has been the way out. I know exactly enough to be dangerous and have meant to deep dive for almost a decade.

awk can be mastered by just reading the man page. The book doesn't take long to read either. Once you understand the simple principles, you can write an infinite number of scripts for all kinds of tasks.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#55

Post by coliveira »

Rediscover wrote: post #43
snitty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DSL == Domain Specific Language?

Yes

One simple thing I do with awk is to create a command processor: read one line at a time and do things on my data as a response. This is very useful because you can make your command as powerful as needed and call other unix tools as a result.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#56

Post by IggleSniggle »

donatj wrote: post #15

I love awk. It’s everywhere and every time I am writing a shell script and work myself into a corner, awk has been the way out. I know exactly enough to be dangerous and have meant to deep dive for almost a decade.

See, when I'm writing a shell script interactively and work myself into a corner, I reach for awk, struggle with it for a bit, and then either:

1) succeed, and regret the messiness of the solution

or

2) fail, and find a non-awk way to handle it.

I really tried to like awk, but its portability hasn't been enough of a feature to raise it above other scripting languages for me. Especially if I'm going to end up in an editor

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#57

Post by IggleSniggle »

joeythedolphin wrote: post #28
kqr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I moved from AWK to Perl for these quick jobs a couple of years ago. If you stick to an AWK-like subset, Perl is also simple, fast and lightweight. If you want to grow your scripts (and you have a lot of discipline) Perl – in contrast to AWK – gives you enough noose to hang^W^W^W^Wthe tools you need.

Perl? Wow. Is that better than bash, python or even nodejs? Why write in Perl over these? Serious question, was propaghandized to hate Perl.

I write bash python and nodejs all day, and have no professional history with Perl.

One day while avoiding working on something important, I spent half a day learning Perl in order to implement something related to a build tool that was being used in the important thing I was avoiding.

I was blown away. It's a really delightful language. Its big downfall is that it makes it feel good to do something "clever."

Perl is a joy to write, and a devil to read. I liked it, and wish I had started my career earlier so I could have enjoyed Perl in its heyday.

I have similar feelings about Ruby.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#58

Post by j1elo »

joeythedolphin wrote: post #28
kqr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I moved from AWK to Perl for these quick jobs a couple of years ago. If you stick to an AWK-like subset, Perl is also simple, fast and lightweight. If you want to grow your scripts (and you have a lot of discipline) Perl – in contrast to AWK – gives you enough noose to hang^W^W^W^Wthe tools you need.

Perl? Wow. Is that better than bash, python or even nodejs? Why write in Perl over these? Serious question, was propaghandized to hate Perl.

I don't write Perl code, but its CLI has been a very good way to replace sed with something decent. sed not supoorting Perl regex syntax, the most commonly kind of regex out there by large, is frankly disappointing. Even grep was able to put it together and add the -P switch. But sed is still stuck in the prehistoric syntax of ERE ("Extended Regular Expressions", as described in man pages) which e.g. instead of \d for a digit, use [[:digit:]], a syntax present in... zero? other tools or programming environments.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#59

Post by anyfactor »

benhoyt wrote: post #25

I was privileged to be one of the technical reviewers for this book. There's a fair bit of the original content (which is still great), but Kernighan's done a great job with some good restructuring and some significant updates, too. The early chapters are very hands-on, with something of a focus on "exploratory data processing", particularly with CSV files. Big data with AWK, you could say. Gawk and awk will soon hav…

Our data product is delivered in CSV format. Even though I create user documentation mainly using csvkit, grep and sed, I would love to convert all those solutions to AWK. Sometimes AWK is more readable than sed and csvkit requires installation.

It will be nice to have a awk cookbook for CSV. In terms of CSV maniupulation and querying there is only a limited number of operations and I think there is potential to standardize those operation using AWK.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#60

Post by calvinmorrison »

galleywest200 wrote: post #52
calvinmorrison wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a crying shame we never settled on a control character separated text format. There's a ascii control characters for record and field (unit) separators. A bit of user space support for that would have been great.

It is a shame. I have been using tab-separated sheets recently as it allows me to simply not care about almost any possible character in my strings...apart from tabs of course. But those are far less common than commas, and putting strings in quotes 100% of the time looks messy to me.

Way less common would be using ascii 30 and ascii 31. ascii 29 and you can cram multiple datasets into one file
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