Frawk: An efficient Awk-like programming language. (2021)

by fanf2 • 2 years ago

58 21 2 years ago

The builtin CSV/TSV parsing seems the killer feature here, at least for me.

I've been using SQL on CSV and JSON lately as it's mostly easiest for me, but I can think back a few times where I've used an *awk for a specific need, AND had to deal with CSV parsing at the same time.

arp242• 2 years ago

Both GNU awk and "one true awk" added --csv last year, so as the README note mentions you probably don't need frawk for this (any more).

tooltower• 2 years ago

What's the common tool people use these days for manipulating json in an awk-like manner?

hermitcrab• 2 years ago

Probably: https://jqlang.github.io/jq/

sceadu• 2 years ago

gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) to transform it and query and then invert the transformation?

tastyminerals22• 2 years ago

If you need just csv/tsv parsing, you can also take a look at https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

fuzztester3• 2 years ago

interestingly, i had read somewhere earlier that those utilities were written in D.

confirmed it by looking at the site just now.

fuzztester3• 2 years ago

How do you use SQL on JSON?

You mean only for strictly tabular JSON, i.e. no nesting beyond rows and columns?

kermatt• 2 years ago

Spark and Drill have options, but DuckDB makes it almost trivial: https://duckdb.org/docs/data/json/overview

michaelcampbell2• 2 years ago

duckdb, as noted by someone else as well.

gpvos4• 2 years ago

frawk was the first awk to add proper CSV support, but the better-known awks have added it now as well, so its utility has become more limited.

Edit: Actually, for correctness' sake: goawk started earlier (2018, frawk 2019). I didn't trawl through the history to see which was at a usable and/or CSV-supporting stage earlier. Both did support CSV before that became trendy though.

gpvos4• 2 years ago

I couldn't help the historian in me: looks like frawk gained CSV support in early 2020 with some bugfixes in July/August that year, while goawk gained it in May 2022, so my initial comment was correct.

anthk2• 2 years ago

frawk is a small programming language for writing short programs processing textual data

AWK can do far more than that. With netcat you can write an IRC/Gopher client in days. There are solitaries written in awk, even tetris and maybe, sokobans.

dTal• 2 years ago

You underestimate it!

https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

anthk2• 2 years ago

A pity it's just for gawk; if it worked under POSIX awk you could use awka to give it a good boost.

Frawk: An efficient Awk-like programming language. (2021)

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