Re: XSLT versus AWK

I like awk alot (not the sort you pasted there though) but it doesn't
support lexical scoping so that would be the limiting use case except most
of the things I do with awk do not require lexical scoping.

What makes it more interesting is that it supports streaming and there is
an XML library for it http://gawkextlib.sourceforge.net/xml/gawk-xml.html

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 7:22 AM Roger L Costello <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> XSLT is a programming language specifically designed for processing
> textual data that is formatted as XML.
>
> AWK is a programming language specifically designed for processing textual
> data that is formatted as records containing fields. Interestingly, I have
> observed that the records/fields format is the one used for input and
> output by most UNIX tools.
>
> XSLT and AWK are mature programming languages. XSLT was created roughly 24
> years ago at the W3C. AWK was created roughly 45 years ago at Bell Labs by
> Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name AWK comes from
> their last names).
>
> XSLT and AWK substantially reduce -- relative to other programming
> languages -- the amount of code, time, and effort needed to process their
> respective data formats. A developer will be far more productive writing an
> XSLT program to process XML-formatted data than if he were to write the
> program in some other programming language. A developer will be far more
> productive writing an AWK program to process records-and-fields-formatted
> data than if he were to write the program in some other programming
> language.
>
> XSLT and AWK are complimentary. An XSLT program can convert an XML
> document into a document containing records and fields. An AWK program can
> convert a document consisting of records and fields into an XML document.
> In fact, just yesterday I did that very thing -- I wrote an AWK program to
> convert to XML a huge document containing records with tab-delimited
> fields, where the first record contained column headers. See my simple,
> short AWK program below (note: I am an AWK newbie, so there are likely
> better ways to write the program).
>
> *Lesson Learned*: Use the right programming language for the right data
> format.
>
> /Roger
>
> *convert2xml.awk*
>
> BEGIN   {  # field separator is tab (x09)
>                  # record separator is CRLF (\r\n)
>                   FS = "\t"
>                   RS = "\r\n"
>                  print "<Airport>"
>                }
> NR==1   {  # get column header names, store in an array
>                   for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
>                      header[i] = $i;
>                }
> NR!=1   {  # create a <Row>...</Row> element for the line
>                   # surround field $i with a start/end tag named header[i]
>                   print "<Row>"
>                   for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
>                      print "<" header[i] ">" $i "</" header[i] ">"
>                   print "</Row>"
>                }
> END       { print "</Airport>" }
>