Darren Reed wrote: > 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. >
The point we're trying to make is not that other ways, such as whitespace separator, user selectable separator, etc, are not impossible or unworkable. They are however, more complex and thus more prone to error, while offering no practical advantages to what is being proposed. If you some advantages to an alternative scheme, by all means point them out. > >> > 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. > We're producing output rather than consuming it. I don't see the relevance. > Darren >
