I have a task that will benefit from writing a good question on Stack Exchange - in that I think the results will be instructive in general. Of course.
There is a large SVG file already on Pastebin.com here, and it needs to be run through command-line JavaScript - see here. This makes a JSON format file. After that step AWK comes in** - to prepare x,y data input (or CSV, if you will) for gnuplot. I could reduce it down to a fake "reproducible" or "academic"-looking case, but this can violate the "X/Y problem" dictates.
Clearly, this is a case where there are many degrees of freedom, shall we say. I am balking at writing a question (I'm thinking Code Review, Stack Overflow, Unix & Linux, and maybe Super User) with this dilemma:
write a specific, narrow question about awk, fields, wildcards, etc. It will look "academic" with
echo aa.aa,bb.bb,cc.cc,dd.dd | awk [..and so on..]and so on as can already be found on Stack Overflow - and are, IMHO, instructive.write a "what needs to be actually done" question, where to do that, pastebin will help, and users have to run a JavaScript they might not have. I could make an output file from the JavaScript and maybe put that in Pastebin.com. But then it appears to be a backhanded way of asking someone to fix my problem (which I hope I do not do, but...).
... so guidance how to write such a question, or where to post perhaps individual "academic"-ish questions will help me write a better question.
UPDATE:
**from doing more homework:
it appears that indicating the JSON file format is important now. originally thought it wasn't a biggie because I start with SVG, which I say.
Homework repeatedly led me to few posts on Stack Overflow (I tend to go to S.O. and U.& L.) that assert sed or awk is not "designed" to parse JSON data and will be "fragile (at best)".. I note the answer with that assertion has +8.
