I doubt everyone will agree what the "optimal" delimited format is. A few points:

• For a program, it doesn't matter what the delimiter is - an "a" is as easy as a tab or a comma.
• For humans, it matters.
• I give much kudos to things that are debuggable with vi and telnet.
• Tabs lose points, because they are not always easy to distinguish from spaces. Furthermore, it's not uncommon to configure editor to expand tabs to spaces.
• Printable punctuation characters are better than letters, digits or control characters.
• The delimiter should be choosen in such a way it's not a common character in the data, to avoid use of a backslash. Don't use a dot as a delimiter when delimiting decimal numbers.
• I've preferences for colons (because important files in /etc do so, semi-colons, dots, hyphens (all three because it's natural) and "horizontal whitespace", that is, any sequence of one or more spaces or tabs. Then you can make columns.

Abigail

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.