Re: Perl or Applescript w/ Excel
Re: Perl or Applescript w/ Excel
- Subject: Re: Perl or Applescript w/ Excel
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 12:59:35 -0700
On Wednesday, August 14, 2002, at 11:44 AM, Pia Zador wrote:
I am about to write a script that takes a bunch of tab-deliminated text
files, extracts certain numeric data, performs simple arithmetic on the
extracted data, and outputs the new data to a workbook in Excel.
Does anyone have suggestions on whether to use Perl scripts or simply
Applescript? Is one easier to use when dealing with tab deliminated
data
and/or Excel workbooks?
If you've got a tab-delimited [1] data file, and you want to turn it
into another tab-delimited file, and you're using Mac OS X, *and*
you're comfortable with using shell tools, you may very well be best
served by awk. It's not as general-purpose as perl, but it's designed
for processing columnar data, which is what you've got.
If any of the above do not apply, however (say you want to apply Excel
formatting to the output, or raw Unix just gives you the willies), then
you should use AppleScript. It's theoretically possible to control
Excel using perl, but it'll be really ugly.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
[1] There is no such word as "deliminated." The word you're looking
for is "delimited."
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