in reply to Best X-delimited format?

Hi,
There are plenty standards for delimiters.
The easiest is CSV (with a ,) or Tabs as you mention.

but the de facto standard now-a-days is XML to delimit data, or more general SGML.
---------------------------
Dr. Mark Ceulemans
Senior Consultant
IT Masters, Belgium

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Best X-delimited format?
by samurai (Monk) on Sep 18, 2002 at 15:54 UTC
    XML is a bit of overkill, isn't it? I mean, a delimiter is usually one byte, whereas XML tags are much larger in bytes by comparison.

    --
    perl: code of the samurai

[reply]
      XML does result in larger files. That said though, larger files are very rarely a problem at this stage. If you are involved in flat files that would be so large that XML encoding them would be prohibitive, then the flat files are probably too big already. Also, XML allows much flexibility in adding, moving, and rearranging the data. It's obvioiusly not the one answer for every situation, but it's the best answer for most situations.
[reply]
        XML allows much flexibility in adding, moving, and rearranging the data.
        That's just hype. Perl will allow you to do the same things on CSV files just as easily. I see no reason at all to use a difficult to parse and bloated XML representation over named-column CSV files, provided the data is strongly tabular.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

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