Forrest's Tech Blog http://www.abstractfactory.org/blogs/f_tech.php Forrest's thoughts on computer stuff en-US hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 The Power of Perl http://www.abstractfactory.org/blogs/f_tech.php?title=the_power_of_perl&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 2006-04-17T04:16:49Z forrest perl Perl is a much-malingned as a write-only language by those who don't know it, but they just don't understand the power. Here's a little anecdote which should clear things up: In a late morning meeting at work, I learned that there was some document corruption problem which was rare and difficult to catch, which showed up in our pdf documents as a double question mark ("??"). Although I only know very little about the pdf format, I said "Oh, I bet I can write a perl program to detect that!" When I got back to my cube, I searched CPAN for "pdf" and spent about half an hour going over my numerous pdf library choices before finally settling on CAM::PDF. Extracting text from the pdf was then a piece of cake, and of course searching for "??" is a trivial matter for perl's famous regular expressions. By the end of that day I had a working program. That's the power of perl. Perl is a much-malingned as a write-only language by those who don't know it, but they just don't understand the power.

Here's a little anecdote which should clear things up:

In a late morning meeting at work, I learned that there was some document corruption problem which was rare and difficult to catch, which showed up in our pdf documents as a double question mark ("??"). Although I only know very little about the pdf format, I said "Oh, I bet I can write a perl program to detect that!"

When I got back to my cube, I searched CPAN for "pdf" and spent about half an hour going over my numerous pdf library choices before finally settling on CAM::PDF.

Extracting text from the pdf was then a piece of cake, and of course searching for "??" is a trivial matter for perl's famous regular expressions.

By the end of that day I had a working program. That's the power of perl.

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