Mung or munge is
computer
A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...
jargon
Jargon, or technical language, is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular Context (language use), communicative context and may not be well understood outside ...
for a series of potentially destructive or irrevocable changes to a piece of data or a file.
It is sometimes used for vague data transformation steps that are not yet clear to the speaker.
Common munging operations include removing punctuation or HTML tags, data parsing, filtering, and transformation.
The term was coined in 1958 in the
Tech Model Railroad Club at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
.
In 1960 the
backronym
A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...
"Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and by 1976 it was revised to "Mung Until No Good", making it one of the first
recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...
s.
It lived on as a recursive command in the editing language
TECO.
Munging may also describe the constructive operation of tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate (also called 'duct-taping'). Munging can also describe the processing or filtering of raw data into another form.
As the "no good" part of the acronym implies, munging often involves irrevocable destruction of data.
See also
*
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...
– a glossary of hacker slang.
*
Slug
Slug, or land slug, is a common name for any apparently shell-less Terrestrial mollusc, terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word ''slug'' is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, a very reduced ...
– an application of munging for creating human-friendly
URL
A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...
s.
*
Kludge
A kludge or kluge () is a workaround or makeshift solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend, and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, ...
– a neologism developed near this time with a similar meaning
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Munged password (referring to a slightly different process)
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Data wrangling
References
External links
{{wiktionary, mung, munge
Jargon File entryMungan
mungeat
FOLDOC
Email address munging is considered harmful
Computer jargon
Computer data
1950s neologisms