It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.