D.J.Bell
NOAO
An automated observing proposal processing system has been in use at KPNO over the past three years. LaTeX proposal templates are filled out by remote users and sent to KPNO via electronic mail. Observer and proposal information fields in these files are well-marked with LaTeX tags, thus allowing automated extraction and importation to observatory databases. A significant complication of this process is that although the fields are well-marked, the information they contain often arrives in a variety of formats that must be recognized and standardized. Perl's regular expression and text manipulation capabilities make it an excellent tool for performing these functions. This poster outlines the filtering system in use at KPNO and discusses some of the general ways perl has proven useful for parsing LaTeX documents.