Re: question about linker

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.

[...]

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */