Fun with NQE parsing and data extraction.
Many customers often ask me about digging into data, especially when it involves sifting through device status or custom command outputs. Sometimes, it's a piece of cake to handle because the data is nicely structured, but other times, it's like solving a puzzle. Just last week, I was helping out a customer who needed to extract security policy data from their enforcement points to keep tabs on various compliance matters. The data they had to deal with was all over the place – lines of varying lengths, multiple strings scattered within the lines, and positional changes for the data we needed.This got me thinking, and I wanted to share some techniques for handling these tricky data chunks. I can't share the exact customer query with you, but I've thrown together a sample query to show one way of tackling this.Imagine you've got data like this:"Don't teach me how to extract stuff with IP address 10.1.1.1 and float 10 from string." "Please teach me how not to extract stuff with IP addres