john fleming wrote:
> Could someone describe data munging and it's uses please?
"Mung" is just slang for manipulate. It connotes sloppy or
destructive work, but not always. The meaning has shifted since The
Hacker's Dictionary's definition was written.
http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_28.html#TAG1197
So data munging just means, AFAIK, manipulating data in a quick
and dirty way.
For example, I did some data munging this morning. Anne had a bunch
of old mail from her Windows NT box at SGI, which she asked me to
convert from .TXT to Unix format. I wrote about 40 lines of Python
that broke it into messages, tried to extract the sender address and
sending date (not all messages had 'em), and prepended a "Unix from"
line to the message.
It was definitely sloppy work. The From: headers had widely varying
formats, half the messages didn't have dates, and the half that did
used at least four different date formats. So I punted on the dates
and set them all to Jan 1 1970. For the sender's email address, I
looked for the word with an @ in it, and if I didn't find one, I
joined all the words together with '_' characters to form an address:
Anne_Eagle.
But she can read that mail into a mail program now, so it was good
enough (I think).
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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