What is the best programming language for data extraction?

I'm not sure what you mean by "data extraction," but SQL is the most common database query language.

What is the best programming language for data extraction?
The algorithms used by winzip and winrar are of course confidential and only its programmers can use it.





You can have another algorithms free (it is written in CLS or class Visual Basic). BlowFish, lFishers and others. You download codes on Planet-Source-Code.com
Reply:I agree with miket. I always use Perl for any text/string manipulation.
Reply:Perl is the easiest for what you need, which is not very complex.
Reply:The classic data extraction language is perl. See perl.com, and hundreds of books at your local bookstore, and various online tutorials. Perl has internal language constructs to pick data out of text files (i.e. logfiles) very easily, plus many add-on modules, including those to read/write xml. Perl stood for (stands for?) practical extraction and reporting language.





The perl executables are available free from www.activestate.com for many computers, and other websites for just about all the rest.





Go for it.
Reply:awk is a good choice, as is perl. For more power, snobol4 (www.snobol4.org) can be used -- an example will illustrate: find all lines with "Apr 4" and extract the substring enclosed in either single or double quotes... in snobol4:





top s = input :f(end)


s 'Apr 4' :f(top)


s any("'" '"') $ delim *break(delim) . output :(top)


end





would do it.





QOTD: "If all you have is a hammer, soon everything begins to look like a skull".