[dc-programmer]

I’m usually not a big side project guy, but I successfully used AWK to solve a IRL problem last year. It really helped solidify my understanding of the language.

The problem was that the Garmin GPS data for a bike ride I had just completed had split into multiple rides. I used AWK to stitch together the data into one file. I also did some basic linear interpolation to fill in missing data points.

The GPS data is formatted as XML and I was able to parse it fairly robustly using AWK.

[account-5]

How did you parse XML with AWK? I would never think of using AWK for XML data. I'd even stear clear of CSV data unless I could guarantee no in field commas or newlines.

[version_five]

Commas are easy if it's quoted. I just first run an awk script that uses " as the field separator and substitutes or deletes commas in odd numbered fields (as long as that's acceptable for your use case). Then with `-F,` I always check that NF is the same for all lines in the csv before proceeding.

Depending on how the xml is structured, it can be possible to just pattern match on the tags if you have something simple to do.

[dc-programmer]

Yes this is it. I patterned matched on tags to create a simple state machine. Then I extracted values using splitlines on commas and quotes