When I worked for PBS, at that time they had thousands of files on ftp, not even a database for the program schedules. All they offered the affiliates was text, and all those files were just mixed together, with meaningless names...and somehow from that content, I had to write a script to identify via regular expressions a way to categorize the files as to what were keywords, or title, or description, or author, or TV series name or whatever. And then using regular expressions, clean up each of those, sort them into arrays, and in perl write the insert statements in SQL and have all those million bits go into their fields in an oracle temporary table, and then do whatever further functions in an Oracle language called PL/MYSQL. If only I did a few catchup courses, I would still be an Oracle whiz. Now I am 3 versions behind I think.
And I don't know if another language has such amazing regular expression capacity as perl.