Is there a meta text processing concept in CS? I understand that text processing could be done in various ways on top of operating systems:


Shell utilities for processing a file (and/or a file name): tr, sed, awk, perl, mv and others
text editors for processing a file (and/or or a file name): nano, Vim, Emacs and others; whether CLUI/TUI/GUI and whether for "plain" or "rich" text
Possible shell builtins: such as compgen to to generate auto-completion matches for specified commands and possibly others


I further understand that generally all of these programs can be empowered by what I can name "meta text processing" implementations such as regex and serialization (for example; JSON key-value pairs).

Is there a meta text processing concept in CS (and what might be a practical example besides regex and serialization)?

I am hoping to find theory regarding text processing, or computer data processing. I don't expect an answer such as "you could use YAML instead JSON".
You should look into Theory of Automata, Languages and Computation:
These are the theoretical foundations of scanning, parsing and processing text (and furthermore constructing formal languages and grammars).

Components of the theory, are, for example:


Pushdown automaton
Context free grammars
Parsing techniques such as recursive decent, LL or SLR parsing.




Classical introductory textbook on this subject is "Introduction To Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation" by John E. Hopcroft,Rajeev Motwani and Jeffrey D.Ullman.