Does it HAVE to be a single typed char seen on the English 101 keyboard ? History Lesson: The industry in the very early, early days of printing, storing, and processing characters, both English and non-English, came up with a solution around the use of Control Characters.
ASCI Char 1 is known as Start Of Header, or abbreviated SOH. ASCII Char 2 is known as Start of Text, or abbreviated STX. ASCII Char 3 is known as End of Text, or abbreviated ETX. It got me thinking of how various industries to this day still use Start of Text and End of Text... what we are discussing as enclosing a String verbatim. Many data operations that I perform with conversion of string fields are actually done by first wrapping with Control Chars [1] to enclose the String LITERALLY. Apple's Enterprise Partner Feed is an example that uses such basic Control Chars to separate fields and interestingly uses multibyte EOL Control Chars to retain even unicode contents (Foreign Language strings, that use quotes of a different nature at times [2] and that sometimes appear in its fields and that need to be retained inside a database field as well.) I am wondering if doing something similar to that the industry does with using Control Chars to represent a STX or ETX would not be even wiser to subplant String Literal ? i.e. do not reinvent the fast spinning wheel that also has built-in never go flat technology. :) [1] http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/ascii-control-characters/start-of-text-ascii-code-2.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_marks Thoughts ? -- -Thad Thad on Freebase.com <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry> Thad on LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/>
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