Until recently I used a combination of command line utilities (grep, tail, sort, wc, less, awk) to extract this information from the access log. But some complex calculations were difficult and time-consuming to perform using these tools. I needed a more powerful solution - a programming language to crunch the data.

Enter Python. Python is fast becoming my favorite language, and was the perfect tool for solving this problem. I created a framework in Python for performing generic text file analysis, and then utilized this framework to glean information from my Apache access log.

This article first explains the framework, and then describes two examples that use it. My hope is that by the end of this article you will be able to use this framework for analyzing your own text files.

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