Re: Compare 2 Tab Delimited

"Leonard Milcin" <leonard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4820b42b$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Arved Sandstrom wrote:
"Chase Preuninger" <chasepreuninger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e50333ba-e8a1-47b5-a82e-865ab191172c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I don't like the idea of tab delimited files. Use something else like
a comma or semicolon.

I'm a little curious as to what you have against tabs. The problem with
commas or semicolons or colons is that now you have to quote fields with
those characters, then handle the situation of the quote character being
in the fields too...namely, our favourite CSV flatfile format. Tabs as
part of your data is much less common, so it's a good delimiter. You
normally don't manually insert the tabs anyway, and any decent text
editor has a "Show whitespace" option if you find that necessary.

Well. Even with ,,show whitespace'' it is usually difficult to say if
something is a tab or a space and it is quite easy to escape special
characters properly.

Regards,
Leonard

It would depend on the editor. On the Windows side, Notepad++ shows tabs as
tabs (an arrow, actually) if you select "Show WS and Tabs", and you don't
have "Replace by space" set for tabs.

As for escaping, sure, it's not so tough. But why do it at all?

AHS


.

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