[warpspin]

> If you have access to the spec, EDI is easy and kind of fun, if you’re into parsing and manipulating data.

Yeah. And for the next business partner, you will have the same kind of "fun". And for the one after that, again. Ad infinitum.

In the real world, you will not even handle simple stuff like purchase orders without some kind of special case for every customer. Not in the parsing part, that's the one thing that works pretty well, but in how to interpret the data afterwards.