[tpm] Solutions and kibitzers

[arocker at Vex.Net]

On the weekend, I responded to a new posting on LinkedIn's Perl discussion
group,"Needhelp to parse data using Perl, AWK or any unix commad " with a
quickie script, and updated it with an improved version the following day.

It seemed to be a simple problem, parsing some sort of *ML stream, and
wc's output on the script was  25  88 526. (6 of those 25 lines do the
actual work.)

To my surprise, I've received all sorts of abuse for not using an XML
parser module. (To which the poster may or may not have had easy access.)
Even though it appears to have solved the poster's problem, the critics
have devoted more keystrokes to complaining than I did producing results.
Now I'm beginning to have doubts.

Would anyone care to read the discussion and comment?