It is a universal truth that textsmiths work with data formats. Yet formats are attempts to impose structure on messy reality, but no format can decide what the right structure is for you. So in this post, we are going to look at what data cleaning is.

In the previous post, we looked at the table. But as textsmiths, we need to look at something that is so basic, something that we work with everyday, namely the comma-separated value file.

When everyone else sees a paragraph, AWK sees a database.