Using un*x since the 90s, this is all I know. I like awk but it can go fucking complicated, I once maintain a 5000 lines script that was parsing csv to generate JavaScript…
At that point I’d be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It’s then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.
There are even awk repositories, but I’m not sure there’s a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.
Someone used the wrong tool for the job. If an awk script gets more than a few dozen lines, it’s time to use another language/tool to process that data.
Using un*x since the 90s, this is all I know. I like awk but it can go fucking complicated, I once maintain a 5000 lines script that was parsing csv to generate JavaScript…
At that point I’d be looking for languages that have libraries that do what I need. Both Python and Perl have online repositories full of pre-written things. Some that can read CSV and others that can spit out JSON. It’s then a matter of bolting things together, which, hopefully, is a few lines of code rather than 5000.
There are even awk repositories, but I’m not sure there’s a central, official one like PyPI or CPAN.
Someone used the wrong tool for the job. If an awk script gets more than a few dozen lines, it’s time to use another language/tool to process that data.