Chapter 3. Data Munging

Hacks 19-27

Perl has always been in love with data. No matter where you find it, Perl happily processes and extracts and reports on files, databases, web pages, spreadsheets, other programs, and anything that produces data. Perl's so happy to do this that it even overlooks brute-force, rough manipulations. Hey, pragmatism works!

Perl can be gentle, too. A little subtlety, a little style and finesse, and you can write maintainable, easy-to-understand code that's just as powerful as the wild-eyed forge-ahead-at-all-costs just-do-the-job code. Why? It's often faster and more correctas well as more secure, more powerful, and shorter.

Sure, slinging data between sources sounds about as glamorous as slinging hash at the local diner, but it doesn't have to be that way. Here are several ideas to munge that yummy data with all of the elegance and style and power and clarity that you know you have.