Sloppy data presentation

I have a client for whom I massage U.S. government supplied weather data. There is a bewildering amount of data available; I haven't a clue what most of it means: I just go get what they want and slice and dice it to their specs.

The folks who produce this data of course think nothing of changing locations, formats, or anything else. That's not unexpected and there's no point griping about it - it is what it is.

What does cause me to make unpleasant faces is sloppiness in data representation. For example, here's a data line from something I was working on yesterday:

DUAN6 200609191320 65.4 0 -996 9 42.03 0 0.00 0 -996.0 9 -996 9 -996.00 9 -996.00 9 -996 0 -996 9 -996 9

It looks like space separated values, easily parsed in Perl with "split /\s+/", but is it? Here's another sample from the same data source.

ABGV1 200609221150 -999.0 1 -996 1 -996 1 0.00-9999 1-996-9999 1-996-9999 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1

What the heck is that? Values are run together. Let's align the two lines to make it easier to see:

DUAN6 200609191320 65.4 0 -996 9 42.03 0 0.00 0 -996.0 9 -996 9 -996.00 9 -996.00 9 -996 0 -996 9 -996 9
ABGV1 200609221150 -999.0 1 -996 1 -996 1 0.00-9999 1-996-9999 1-996-9999 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1 -996 1

Hmmm. So it's not fixed length.. but it's not space delimited either. It's just a mess.

This particular mess is easy enough to fix. The only time we get this overlap is with negative numbers, so:

s/-/ -/g;
@line=split /\s+/;

That works. It's annoying, but hardly a "big deal". It is however, in my opinion, real sloppiness in the original programming. If there was no care for being human readable, why space anything out at all? Why not just run it together in pure record form? DUAN6200609191320000065.4 etc.? Apparently there was some intent at presentation, so why not make ALL data lines consistent?

Yeah, I know: grumpy old Unix guys. Ayup, that's me.

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