Why use Perl to manipulate data?
While commonly available applications such as Microsoft Excel can import and export delimited data, and in some cases can also import and export XML, they are limited in that they are optimized for performing tasks other than those frequently required to solve problems encountered in library data. Specialized tools for manipulating MARC records or XML exist, and in many cases these will meet most of your needs. For example, MARCEdit is a free Windows program that lets you create and edit MARC records easily. One reason you may want to use Perl to write your own script instead is that Perl can extract data from a large variety of data sources, such as relational databases, web pages (depending on the regularity of the HTML), and structured data such as text files, and then combine all of this data in useful ways. Because of the amount of control that Perl and other programming languages provide, with a little effort it is possible to solve a greater variety of problems than most ready-m
