Depends on how they output the extracted "construct of interest". In the end, this may very well be a stream of bytes. But that exactly was my thinking as well

Depends on how they output the extracted "construct of interest". In the end, this may very well be a stream of bytes. But that exactly was my thinking as well. Complicated data-types sure need different tools, but if you want to use somethinng like grep and diff, it would be nice to have simple data. Which leads to the thinking that not grep and diff are the issue, but the data. Though the article even states it's not about replacement, but about a different area of usage: >Such utilities could provide administrators the ability to work with more complex forms of data now being generated by network equipment and infrastructure software.