<i>So you have to distinguish between output meant for a program and output meant for human.</i><p>That pretty much defines my career, yes.<p><i>Say someone gives you a logfile of problematic transactions - you then have to convert all the numbers to decimal points before using them in some one-off program that checks them.</i><p>Say someone gives me a MongoDB full of transactions that need to be transformed into relational data for our data warehouse...hey, I&#x27;ll bet I could make a career out of this.<p>I truly don&#x27;t mean to be trite, but what you describe is just the way of things. In your log file example, a regex would more than likely solve the problem. One loop, a readln() and a writeln(), sorted. People do it everyday. Hell, I&#x27;ll probably do something similar before the day is out.