Introduction
Text is everywhere. Newspaper articles, database dumps, spreadsheets, the output of shell commands, keyboard input; it’s all text, and it can all be processed in the same fundamental way. Text has been called “the universal interface,” and since the early days of Unix in the 1960s this universal interface has survived and flourished—and with good reason.
Unlike binary formats, text has the pleasing quality of being readable by humans as well as computers, making it easy to debug and requiring no distinction between output that’s for human consumption and output that’s to be used as the input for another step in a process.
Processing text, then, is a valuable skill for any programmer today—just as it was fifty years ago, and just ...
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