Processing barcode scanner data with awk and sed

Published on 17 August 2007 in Linux. 2 Comments

We had an interesting project pop up here at the Library where I work yesterday. Apparently, part of our inventory process here involves downloading text files with raw barcode data from our barcode scanners, extracting the barcode from amidst the other junk data that pads it in the file, and then loading a freshly formatted list into Millennium, our library’s catalogue software.

I’m not typically involved with inventory or the particulars of maintaining the Millennium catalogue, but I was called in to help with writing some bash scripts to facilitate the process. Continue reading ‘Processing barcode scanner data with awk and sed’

Rendering XML as valid RSS with XSLT

Published on 13 August 2007 in PHP and XML & XSL. 2 Comments

I’ve been using a simple XML file to store updates to the main duncanandmeg.org website, and wanted to use XSL to transform that data into a valid RSS feed. This took a little more work than most of my XSL templates to date, so I thought I’d log the details here. Continue reading ‘Rendering XML as valid RSS with XSLT’