The Perl language is well suited for use with "data munging" tasks: those that involve transforming and massaging data. While Perl is commonly used for such tasks, there has been no book focused on the topic of munging. This book covers the basic paradigms of programming and discusses the many techniques that are specific to Perl. It also examines standard data formats such as text, binary, HTML, and XML before giving tips on creating and parsing new structured data formats. Source code downloads and technical support from the authors are available on publisher's Web site.