Peter Memishian wrote: > > What it sounds like to me, is that you're suggesting that rather than > > utilities automatically use a particular field separator, they should > > use white space (of some kind) unless they're told to use another > > character. > > Which (again) doesn't work if you need to have empty fields, which is > quite common (and no, we must not corrupt data by changing empty values to > another token). >
An interesting statement given that many text file formats do indeed have some sort of token/symbol to indicate "NULL", so it isn't as insurmountable as is being suggested. > > This falls in line with the behaviour of tools like awk, cut, etc. > > All of those commands allow a field separator to be specified. Yes and that was the purpose of mentioning them - to suggest the idea that perhaps the field separator should be chosen by the user and if not, whitespace used. Darren
