Joel Rees <joel.r...@gmail.com> writes:

> 2014/07/07 10:39 "Joe Pfeiffer" <pfeif...@cs.nmsu.edu>:
>>
>> Joel Rees <joel.r...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > 2014/07/07 5:08 "Nuno Magalhães" <nunomagalh...@eu.ipp.pt>:
>> >>
>> >> On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 9:03 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi
>> >> <raju.mailingli...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > I am still exploring all the suggestions given by others. But SQLite 
>> >> > looks
>> >> > very promising. There is a Perl DBI Interface to SQLite which might be 
>> >> > what
>> >> > I am after.
>> >>
>> >> >> > 2) I want the data to be in text format.
>> >>
>> >> SQLite keeps data in binary files.
>> >
>> > What do you mean by that?
>>
>> Presumably, as opposed to human-readable text files.
>
> Uhm, is text not a subset of binary (when talking about the contents of the 
> files that implement a database)?
> Does SQLite encode  text fields in some non-human-readable manner?
>
> Okay, thinking about it a bit, the lack of delimiters, and the puzzling 
> nature of binary zero when trying to
> read it as text, might be what Nuno was referring to. Comma delimited files 
> provide visible, understandable
> delimiters, 
>
> Oh, and the INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is never readable as TEXT.
>
> For some people seeking to keep data in text format, that might disqualify 
> SQLite. Apparently not  the OP?

My typical experience is that when people distinguish "text" vs
"binary" files, they mean the whole file can reasonably be made sense
of in a text editor (that's not a precise definition, of course, but I
think it serves the purpose).  When I open an SQLite database I have
handy with emacs, it is rife with nulls and other non-printing
characters.  Similarly, when I try to run 'less' on it, the response
is

    babs:506$ less house.db
    "house.db" may be a binary file.  See it anyway?

Arguably, as people typically use the distinction, it's not a text
file.  Yes, I can extract the text fields as human-readable ASCII,
but that does not make it a text file.

>Okay, thinking about it a bit, the lack of delimiters, and the puzzling nature 
>of binary zero when trying to read it as text,
>might be what Nuno was referring to. Comma delimited files provide visible, 
>understandable delimiters,

And what just about anybody else would mean by a text file, as well.

>Oh, and the INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is never readable as TEXT.
>
>For some people seeking to keep data in text format, that might
>disqualify SQLite. Apparently not the OP? 

My impression (I'd have to go back and recheck) is that it
disqualified it for the OP, as well.


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