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AWK vs Markdown: What are the differences?
Developers describe AWK as "A language for text processing, data extraction and reporting". A data-driven scripting language consisting of a set of actions to be taken against streams of textual data – either run directly on files or used as part of a pipeline – for purposes of extracting or transforming text, such as producing formatted reports. On the other hand, Markdown is detailed as "Text-to-HTML conversion tool/syntax for web writers, by John Gruber". Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
AWK and Markdown belong to "Languages" category of the tech stack.
AWK is an open source tool with 206 GitHub stars and 41 GitHub forks. Here's a link to AWK's open source repository on GitHub.
reddit, StackShare, and Asana are some of the popular companies that use Markdown, whereas AWK is used by Betaout, itexto, and Datto. Markdown has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1006 company stacks & 4064 developers stacks; compared to AWK, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.
If you have a file (demo.txt) that has 3 columns:
Column-1 Column-2 Column-3
Row-1a Row-2a Row-3a
Row-1b Row-2b Row-3b
Row-1c Row-2c Row-3c
Row-1d Row-2d Row-3d
Row-1e Row-2e Row-3e
and you want to only view the first column of the file in your CLI, run the following:
awk {'print $1'} demo.txt
Column-1
Row-1a
Row-1b
Row-1c
Row-1d
Row-1e
If you want to print the second column of demo.txt, just replace $1 with $2
Pros of AWK
Pros of Markdown
- Easy formatting345
- Widely adopted246
- Intuitive194
- Github integration132
- Great for note taking41
- Defacto GitHub lingo2
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Cons of AWK
Cons of Markdown
- Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)2
- Inconsistend flavours eg github, reddit, mmd etc1
- Limited syntax1
- Not suitable for longer documents1
- Non-extensible1
- No right indentation1
- No underline1
- Unable to indent tables1
