Target audience:
Novice perl programmers who are familiar with simple I/O and variables, and who want to a deeper insight into the techniques of Perl's "core business": extraction, manipulation, and reporting of data.

What attendees will learn:
This tutorial will show you how to use a range of standard Perl features and numerous CPAN modules to read in, decipher, process, and reformat ASCII text data.

You will learn:

• how regular expressions work, and how to make them work better for you,
• how to balance nested brackets and match delimiters
• how to recognize and process common text formats like CSV and HTML
• how to preprocess archived text formats like (g)zip, tar, uuencoding, MIME, and binary formats,
• how to handle ambiguity and errors when processing text,
• how to convert your processed data back into readable text, in either fixed or floating formats
• how to extract, process, and generate simple natural language data,

Tutorial outline:

• Getting at the data in the first place
  • Un(g)zipping, untarring, uudecoding, demiming
  • Compress::Zlib
  • Archive::Tar
  • Convert::UU
  • MIME tools
  • Handling file inclusions
• Regular expressions
  • How they work
  • How they're used (m//, s///, split, grep)
  • How to build them (easily)
  • Common regexps and Regexp::Common
• Some useful modules for decoding particular formats
  • Text::CSV_XS for comma separated values
  • Text::Balanced for delimiters, brackets, and tags
  • HTML::TreeBuilder for HTML
  • unpack and vec for binary formats
• Simple transformations
  • Text::Tabs
  • Text::Autoformat
• Fuzzy processing
  • String::Approx and String::EditDistance
  • Text::Soundex and Text::Metaphone
• Natural language
  • Lingua::EN::Inflect
  • Lingua::EN::Infinitive
  • Lingua::EN::Squeeze
• Reporting
  • printf and sprintf
  • Text::Autoformat::form()
  • Interpolation