Comment by tempaccount5050
7 hours ago
I think that's a little unfair. It really comes down to parsing text and you'll have similar issues even if you use a database or whatever you think the "real" solution is. I have a project I'm working on right now that stores dates, phone numbers, and website links. Cleaning/parsing has been 90% of the work and I still have edge cases that aren't fully solved. Every time I think I'm done, I find something else I haven't thought about. Local AI models have been a huge help though for sanitizing.
that's a little unfair. It really comes down to parsing text and you'll have similar issues even if you use a database or whatever
Feel free to show a real-world example of a database or whatever that takes the input string "IGF1 SEPT2 PRX3 MARCH1" and writes that into storage as ["IGF1", "2026-09-02", "PRX3", "2026-03-01"].
Also with Excel, an inadvertent click+drag can move data between cells, and since the cells are uniform it's hard to see that anything unintended happened. I've seen people lose files in Windows Explorer the same way: double-click with a shaky hand can easily move a file into a subdirectory.
You still have to push and pull from the db. Meaning transforms still need to happen in either direction. I get what you're saying but it's just as easy to screw up a regex in either direction. Or making assumptions about how your language of choice will handle dates etc.