Re: Tab delimiter

Richard wrote:
Donald Tees wrote:
Fujitsu very definitely expands tabs while reading line sequential
files. I believe there is a setting that allows you to turn it off, but
the default is to expand tabs.

There is no runtime option that I have been able to find. The is
CBR_TRAILING_BLANK_RECORD to suppress the trailing blanks on writing,
but nothing that I know of for tabs on reading.

There is a TAB compiler option, but this controls what the compiler
does with tabs in the source file, and does not affect the program
running.


As an aside, Microfocus (or at least the Microsoft version of it) had a
(-N) runtime switch to suppress tab expansion, as well as a system call that could be executed from within the program to do the same. In the long run,
I found these to be so awkward that I instead wrote an assembly language routine to do the chore of reading sequential files. This proved to be quite reliable, and also allowed accommodating other non-printable characters, as well as files with non-DOS line terminations ... files from other systems with other variation of textual data files.

I haven't had to deal with this yet in Fujitsu... it's good to know ahead of time that there's no way to work around it, other than perhaps preprocessing the input file, as my assembly skills aren't what they used to be.
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