[aprssig] Programming Language Advice

[Joel Maslak]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 11:58 PM, Ray Wells wrote:

>> 15/05:30pm 29.4 29.4 19.7 56 6.3 E 19 26 10 14 1008.3 - 0.0
> Using cut I can extract the fields of interest - 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 and
> 14 which are temperature, humidty, course, speed, gust, barometer and
> total rainfall since 9.00am (that's the standard we use).
>
> I have a shell script to convert course in compass points to degrees,
> and I have a perl script to convert the metric figures to imperial,  
> and
> round up/down.
>
> I'd like to be able to handle the lot with a single programming  
> language
> and end up with a line I can feed to xastir.
>
> The question is, what should I be using, perl or awk? Armed with the
> answer I can devote my time in that direction.


I'd do it in Perl, it's very flexible and will do whatever you need -  
depending on what the station actually is, there may even be a Perl  
module to decode it.

Awk would do what you want, too, but may be a bit harder to get help  
and support on.