James Clarks wrote:Comments above are very good...take heed.
The Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) is a very powerful language and best suited for heavy text manipulation/conversion/transformation. This is especially useful when dealing with SGML or XML data or any of the popular EDI formats, e.g. EDIFACT. In these cases, Perl is the better tool than Java and having this skillset is a good thing. If you can only think in "Java" then you are playing with a severe handicap
Good luck!
I think I'll have to take exception to the idea that Perl is a great language for XML/SGML. The regex parsers alone can't do much with that particulan format, so you end up having to bring in external parsing code, and in many cases that means that CPAN and I get into merry-go-rounds. It's IMHO far easier to parse XML with Java or Python.
However, Perl does do sterling work on things like EDI format. And one of it's original intents was to be able to decompose "printed" reports (in text file format) back into raw data. Which is the "Extraction" part of perl.
The Reporting part has made PERL one of the original Unix report writer apps, since it allows one to "paint" the report in a WYSIWYG-like form. It's also quite useful when preparing web pages. Perl was one of the orignal CGI languages, and even today is occasionally used for that purpose.