Thursday, December 02, 2004

What is a munger?

Apparently, it is a routine that parses, and modifies, text in some editor, or otherwise changes data. Often written in PERL, or JAVAscript, or something else. But if you wrote a routine in SAS to change part of a field in every observation in a data set, that would be a primitive munger.

For example, a munger might turn this: *bold* into this: bold.

For example (again), see this....

The verb is actually "mung" (pronounced munj), and if you need some munging you need a munger.

From the book on data munging with PERL:

the point of data munging is to take data in one format, carry out various transformations on it, and write it out in another format. Let's take a closer look at where the data might come from and where it might go.

First a bit of terminology. The place that you receive data from is known as your data source. The place where you send data to is known as your data sink.

Now you know....though you may have known, and not cared.


Anonymous said...

According to the OED - munge is also an obsolete term defined as follows.

trans. To wipe (a person's nose); fig. to cheat.

1660 Eng. Monarchy Freest St. in World 7 They munged the peoples Noses, and publiquely pickt their pockets.

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