"Munging" is a computer term referring to the process of data conversion. Perl is particularly well suited to data munging and this programmer's guide provides advice on how to most efficiently manipulate data using Perl. After the manipulation of unstructured, record-oriented, fixed-width, and binary data is explored, the work moves into the realms of hierarchical data structures and parsers such as HTML and XML parsing tools. Finally, a demonstration of how to write one's own parsers for data structures is provided. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)