[pphysch]

"structured data" usually means there are delimiting characters, states, etc. AWK can certainly handle this. It's a simple and powerful language.

I don't think I've ever used it to parse JSON, but I've definitely used it to output simple JSON.

[aasasd]

Are you telling me that awk can correctly identify delimiters inside quoted strings? Escaped quotes inside quoted strings? Newlines inside quoted strings? I.e. that awk actually has a csv parser? Very cool if so.

[pphysch]

Yeah, you can implement a basic FSM and use `next` to handle fake `RS` (e.g. newlines).

I'm not necessarily recommending it, but it's certainly possible and could be portable and really fast to run with a low memory footprint.

[aasasd]

Well, awk having a csv parser via the user implementing that parser is not quite what I have in mind when I turn to awk for some quick field splitting—and I don't think it's what others in the thread meant either, as evidenced by the linked site.

Personally I prefer using a readymade and tested library in any language that I might touch, so I can just do my own thing on top. Or, in command line, to use an util that employs such a library. Kind of hope that I'm never so constrained that only awk is available and I can't even spin up Lua.