Text generation

Parsing text is super important. But generating text (or markup) to a pattern is another very common programming task that can be surprisingly painful.

Vim is pretty great for a lot of repetitious tasks. But it gets really crazy really quickly if you need to generate text with sequences or any sort of logic (say you need to generate FizzBuzz to put it in your document).

The best tool I always know and always have nearby is PHP. I love php-text-generation.