Re: question about linker

On 12/5/2024 5:09 PM, Keith Thompson wrote:

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:

On 12/5/2024 9:16 AM, Tim Rentsch wrote:

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:
[considering .csv files and how to process them]
>

Brings up the thought of how, ASCII has a bunch of control
characters, but generally only a small number of them are used:
    \r, \n, \t, \b
    \e, \a, \v, \f (sometimes / rarely)
>
For CSV, we used ',' (a printable ASCII character) for something
that (theoretically) could have used \x1E (Record Separator).

That would have been a horrible decision.

>
Well, ASCII has all of these control characters, with assigned uses,
and we use only a few of them...
>
But, yeah:
Pros of comma: Easy to type, plain text, ...
Cons of comma: AFAIK, CSV files often can't have commas in data fields.

 CSV files *can* have commas in data fields, and there are well-defined
ways to represent them.  For example, this line has three fields:
      one,"two,three",four
 And there are additional rules for fields containing quotation marks.
 See <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt> for the most widely accepted
specification.
 Note that RFC 4180 specifies CRLF line endings.  Many of the CSV files
I've dealt with use LF instead.
     Encoding considerations:
        As per section 4.1.1. of RFC 2046 [3], this media type uses CRLF
       to denote line breaks.  However, implementors should be aware that
       some implementations may use other values.
 

OK, looked...
I hadn't been aware that quoting and similar was a thing for CSV files (I had previously thought it only supported unquoted fields with the comma always being interpreted as a separator).

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