Re: OT - trivial programming language
On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 02:55:35PM -0400, richard lyons wrote:
> I'm asking for a bit of advice here.
>
> I wish to convert a kaddressbook database to abook format saving as
> many fields as possible.
>
> I could do this by exporting to cvs, importing to gnumeric (or any
> spreadsheet), shuffling the columns around, re-exporting to cvs and
> importing back to abook. I'll lose a lot more than I want to, as the
> abook cvs is only a partial dump.
>
> I could do it in BASIC - I still vaguely remember my first language!
>
> I could probably do it in perl - but I've never really learned perl,
> and would have to work from the manual.
>
> But it seems to me most rational to use the opportunity to begin
> learning one of the lighter languages that I keep seeing mention of.
> So the question is, which do you people recommend?
>
It sounds like sed or awk is the optimal solution for what you want to
do.
> The input data will be the cvs dump from kmail, and the output will be
> abook native format, which is a series of numbered paragraphs ,
> reminiscent of an doze .ini file. That is to say, it begins:
> [2]
> name=name
> email=email1@here.com,email2@here.com,email3@here.com,email4@here.com
> address=address_1
> address2=address_2
> city=hereville
> ...
> so I assume sed is less than optimal. It seems like a function I
> might need again, so it is worth having it in a script.
>
> I really do need to equip myself with a convenient scripting language
> for all these day-to-day admin tasks, and I'd like it if it can do a
> little maths for me at time too. Please advise me which manual to
> open.
>
> TIA
>
> --
> richard
>
>
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