Netmiko and TextFSM Tutorial | Part # 3

What does TextFSM and ntc-templates allow you to do?

It allows you to take unstructured data and convert it into structured data. Or worded differently, it takes a block of text and converts it to lists and dictionaries (or some combination thereof).

And even better, if someone has already written the TextFSM template for you, then you might be able to just get structured data directly. See the ntc-templates index file which maps platform and show command to TextFSM templates.

So to recap, TextFSM is a complex, regular expression state-machine that converts from blocks of string to structured data (lists and dictionaries) and in the context of ntc-templates various people have already done the parsing for you (for some set of platforms and show commands).