On Tuesday 01 June 2004 11:21 am, fredt wrote: (I probably should subscribe to -developers...)
> These features would be nice to have. > The current implementation cannot be extended to support all of these > features in read/write mode, because with a shutdown compact, the whole > file is rewritten. > > 1) Blank lines are fine anywhere in read-only mode. > 3) Whole line Comments can be supported in read only mode. We need to allow > the comment character as a SET TABLE .. SOURCE property and skip the lines > beginning with this character in the Reader. Treating comments and blank lines as non-tokens is a normal behaviour I'd expect from most parsers. So I don't think read-write support for these in hsqldb is worth the trouble. > 2) We need a property to allow fixed-width fields. It is easy to implement, > only the Writer needs changes. If you want to also implement fixe-width > fields without separators (leaving out the pipe in your example), it would > need a bit more work, both in Reader and Writer. I think all that needs to be done is pad the values to N if strict size is enforced. Fixed-width fields without separators is a totally different format and you probably don't want it. My personal experience is that people use tabs in these files all the time. And you get to tell them, over and over again, that your software didn't turn their data into garbage, it's just off by seven characters and here's the Fine Manual that tells you exactly how and why that happens. > It would be better to introduce these features together with the ability to > allow end of line characters in (quoted) character fields. I think the really important part is to quote fields that contain record separators (+ field separators and quote chars) and let users pick their own quote characters and RS. The tricky part is to make all special tokens (i.e. ones that need to be quoted) user-definable -- that should let us handle most common formats. Dima ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the new InstallShield X. >From Windows to Linux, servers to mobile, InstallShield X is the one installation-authoring solution that does it all. Learn more and evaluate today! http://www.installshield.com/Dev2Dev/0504 _______________________________________________ hsqldb-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hsqldb-developers
