The problem with a tab delimited file is that the tabs are hard to see in a normal text editor. Is that '" "\t"' or '" "\t" or whatever?

So the basic problem is that tabs are not easily "visible". My programming editor also converts "tabs" to "spaces" when I write a program file. No program file that I work with has tab characters in it. When I "save it" all the tabs disappear.

There is not a "standard" for the number of spaces for a tab character. In the "olden days", this made a difference because it saved disk space. This makes no difference now. Or in a practical sense, the space saving makes no difference. And it is "hard to read" the output.

Many of the DB output formats that I work with use "|" as the field separator. That is not a valid character for a name or an address. This works well for many types of DB fields that you might want to import/export and you can just use a simple split() for input. Perl has a number of .CSV parsers and they do work very, very well. That is another option.

This tab idea is a problem because it is hard to see! Yes, I can deal with it and I can set editor settings to allow me to see the difference between 2 spaces versus one space and tab, but this is a hassle.

In reply to Re^3: EMPTY OUTPUT FILE GENERATED by Marshall
in thread EMPTY OUTPUT FILE GENERATED by perlneedhelp2012

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.