So data munging just means, AFAIK, manipulating data in a quick

and dirty way.

What's AFAIK stand for?

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).



So it's a very roughly defined term thats used to describe scraping data up out of one platform/format/program , and stuffing it into the one you want to read out of? Preserving what you can and just getting the meat across?

Also Most of the links I found on it use perl to do it but some use python, if python is good enough to work in most cases that's good enough for purposes of exploration but do you professional types use other tools?
J.F



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