Raw data is rarely beautiful. It comes with trailing spaces, inconsistent casing, and unwanted characters.
The Sed Strike: Cleaning the Surface
To remove all trailing whitespace and change ‘ID:’ to ‘student_id:’, we use sed:
sed -i 's/[[:space:]]*$//; s/ID:/student_id:/g' enrollment.txt
The Awk Strike: Rebuilding the Structure
Now, if we want to flip the ‘First Name, Last Name’ to ‘Last Name | First Name’ and capitalize the first letter, awk is our architect:
awk -F, '{print toupper(substr($2,1,1)) substr($2,2) " | " $1}' students.csv
By the time the data reaches your Go application, it is pure, structured, and ready for work. This is the essence of the Textsmith’s craft.
Forged in the terminal. Refined under the anvil.