The Content Extraction Language is an AWK-like line oriented programming language. Its purpose is to recognize and extract structured fields of data from specific lines of incoming text files, and assemble those fields into a flat record of data which it passes on to a subsequent process (e.g., Map Designer). To do this, CXL provides a wide variety of pattern recognition, computing and data-manipulation capabilities. This robust and expressive scripting language gives users a valuable tool to tackle the problem of extracting useful field and record structures from the huge and ever-growing volume of complex text files.