Best language to do text parsing in?
I frequently find myself writing small programs to parse text files (typically CSV files) and find that I always fall back on writing these parsers in Java simply because that's the language I'm most familiar with.

But since this sort of task keeps coming up, what language would people recommend I use for this kind of task? I'm happy to invest the time in learning a new language if it would save me time in the long run whenever I write this sorts of thing.

I'm not concerned at how quickly the language itself can run/parse files. What I want is a language that makes writing ad hock parsers easy/quick. I'm suspect Java is not the most efficient language for me to be doing thing kind of thing in.

Python? Ruby? Something else? (Please, don't let it be Perl)


Best language to do text parsing in?
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I frequently find myself writing small programs to parse text files (typically CSV files) and find that I always fall back on writing these parsers in Java simply because that's the language I'm most familiar with.

But since this sort of task keeps coming up, what language would people recommend I use for this kind of task? I'm happy to invest the time in learning a new language if it would save me time in the long run whenever I write this sorts of thing.

I'm not concerned at how quickly the language itself can run/parse files. What I want is a language that makes writing ad hock parsers easy/quick. I'm suspect Java is not the most efficient language for me to be doing thing kind of thing in.

Python? Ruby? Something else? (Please, don't let it be Perl)

