in reply to Thoughts on designing a file format.
Nice post. I've learnt too many of these the hard way
with inherited formats. In particular, one format lacked
easily identifiable record types so the a record's
subtype may depend on the first field or the first and
second, the length of the second depending on the first...
Other thoughts:
- Dependency ordered records, that is parents before their children.
- Count, checksum or hash at the end (I think a line count gives a false sense of protection from corruption).
- The two points above make file processing more streamable.
- Consider specifying character encodings.
- Don't be cryptic to save characters, have a plain text format and zip it.
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Meditations