https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tags/text-records/ Recent content in Text Records on Under the Anvil Hugo en-us Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:26:52 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/weekly-nugget/five-commands-to-inspect-csv-files/ Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:26:52 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/weekly-nugget/five-commands-to-inspect-csv-files/ These commands work beautifully for simple CSV files, but they are not full CSV parsers. Quoted fields containing commas, embedded newlines, escaped quotes, and similar cases are where awk needs care—or where a dedicated CSV parser becomes the right tool. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:33:46 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ Perl is in an interesting position today. It is no longer the language that every system administrator or text-processing enthusiast is expected to know, yet many of the ideas we take for granted today—powerful regular expressions, concise text transformations, one-liners, and “glue” programming—owe a great deal to Perl. Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox? https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/the-textsmith-bookshelf-data-science-at-the-command-line/ Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:28:49 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/the-textsmith-bookshelf-data-science-at-the-command-line/ How a Unix terminal became a data analysis laboratory https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/awk-the-secret-arsenal-of-a-textsmith/ Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:22:42 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/awk-the-secret-arsenal-of-a-textsmith/ When everyone else sees a paragraph, AWK sees a database. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/why-plain-text-scales-better-than-you-think/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:21:30 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/why-plain-text-scales-better-than-you-think/ Why does plain text fits the bill when it comes to backing up information for long-term? The answer lies in its format: it does well as source, and asn end-product in data. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/keeping-your-personal-finances-in-git/ Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:22:01 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/keeping-your-personal-finances-in-git/ A major benefit of plain text accounting is that you can treat your personal finance in the same way you treat your other precious data: placing it under version control and tracking its revision. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/book-review-effective-awk-programming/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:15:16 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/book-review-effective-awk-programming/ This is a review of a classic book that does not only teach you the art of text-processing, but eases you into the world of programming.