"Which language is best for xxx task" I am often asked. And I'll listen to the questioner's description of his application, his background, and the sort of support he'll have at his place of coding before coming up with a suggestion. Never would I suggest he learn all three.

And yet, today, I found myself with a little task to do - it took me no more that a few minutes - and I used all three languages without even thinking about it.

The task. A 900 Mbyte web log file - recording all the traffic from the last year at our First Great Western Customer Forum and a requirement to get some information out of it about the geographic spread of the visitors.

1. A little bit of PERL (the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) to pull all the different IP addresses that have visited the site out of the file.

#!/usr/bin/perl -na
$counter{$F[0]}++;
END {
@hl = sort keys %counter;
print $#hl+1," unique hosts\n";
foreach $ak(@hl) {
  print "$ak $counter{$ak}\n";
}}


2. A PHP script - as we have the PHP / MaxMind routines easily accessible - to add the country of origin for each visitor to the data (that's right - PHP running from the command line!)

<?php
include("../../include/stdphp.v8");
print "never mind!\n";
foreach (file("uniquehosts") as $line) {
  $lns = explode(" ",$line);
  $coco = getcountry($lns[0]);
  if (ereg("...",$coco[id])) {
  print "$coco[id] $line"; } else {
  print "XXX $line"; }
}
?>

3. Another piece of Perl to count the number of visiting IP addresses from each country

while (<DATA>) {
  ($c,$ip,$k) = split;
  $byc{$c}++;
  $byk{$c}+= $k;
}
foreach $co(sort {$byc{$b} <=> $byc{$a}} keys %byc) {
  print "$byc{$co} $co\n";
}

__END__
XXX 116.122.81.28 32
XXX 116.199.208.54 7
XXX 116.214.24.78 34
etc

4. and finally Interactive Python in place of a calculator to do some final statistical arithmetic on the results.

OK - I'll admit it; I got caught miscoding once by the different format of foreach in Perl and PHP, but otherwise it all worked pretty well. If you want to see the information extracted by this process, look here. And, no, I'm not really proud of the beauty of my code; written to fulfil a quick one-off hacking job.

If you think I've not given Python a fair run above, you're right. But then I have been using it all day as a notepad as I do my final personal tax calculations, with all the additions keyed in so I can go back and check my sums as I may need to over the next few days. That's code and numbers that I won't be sharing here, of course!
(written 2008-01-20, updated 2009-01-28)

 G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility
  [3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)
  [3563] How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter? - (2011-12-26)
  [3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
  [3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
  [3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
  [3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
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  [3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
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  [3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
  [2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
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  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
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  [2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
  [2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
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  [2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielillä - (2009-08-09)
  [2340] ldning, Open Source dator språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2339] Opplæring, Open Source datamaskinen språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
  [2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
  [2336] Formação, Open Source computador línguas - (2009-08-09)
  [2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
  [2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
  [2333] Formación, de los lenguajes de código abierto - (2009-08-09)
  [2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
  [2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
  [2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
  [2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
  [1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
  [1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
  [1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
  [1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
  [1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
  [1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
  [1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
  [1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
  [1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
  [1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
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  [1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
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  [1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
  [1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
  [1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
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  [1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
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  [800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
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  [681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
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  [533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
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  [274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
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  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
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  [182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
  [179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
  [173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
  [165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
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  [109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
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  [32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)

Q777 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Technology Overviews
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  [2607] Answers on Ruby on Rails - (2010-01-30)
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Q904 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Analysing a Programming Task
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  [1607] Learning to program in Perl - (2008-04-11)
  [1345] Perl and Shell coding standards / costs of an IT project - (2007-09-11)
  [747] The Fag Packet Design Methodology - (2006-06-06)

Back to Summer Ball at Bowood - Saturday 12th July 2008

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Autovivification - the magic appearance of variables in Perl

Python - formatting objects
Pictures you can use - for free - from our library
Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status
Autovivification - the magic appearance of variables in Perl
Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python!
Summer Ball at Bowood - Saturday 12th July 2008
Buses from Well House Manor, Melksham, to Bath
Handling Binary data (.gif file example) in Perl
Extracting information from a file of records
How not to write Perl?