Steve McDaniels wrote:
>
> I would NOT use a separator because one cannot guarantee that the separator
> is not part of the data.
>
> Try something like RTRIM on the offending field(s)
>
> select rtrim(column1) a, ...
>
How do you know that spaces won't be part of the value? You can't just
flatly say that no one should use delimiters since they may be part of the
daya.
Flat files have been used since the earliest days. There are two basic
types of flat files:
- SDF (Standard Delimited Files). In the olden days these were often
called card image files because the physical record length was 80
characters - the number of characters that could be entered on a punch
card. If the logical record spanned more than one physical record, then
some type of continuation character was used to logically join the two
records. Every field in the record was assigned a specific length and
therefore you could always know that a field would span specific columns.
Strings were left justified. Numbers were right justified.
- Delimited files. The data fields in these files are separated by a
pre-determined delimiter. Because certain windows applications have a
strong preference for data delimited by commans there is even a
sub-catetory that many people are now familiary with - CSV (Comma Seperated
Values). The practice of using a delimited file is widely accepted and as
long as the delimiter does not appear in the data then it will cause no
problem in usage. The individuals who work with the data for any individual
application are the best positioned to determine what printable characters
would not appear in the data.
For someone to just blanketly say "I would NOT use a separator because one
cannot guarantee that the separator is not part of the data." demonstrates
that they are just mere amateurs in the data processing world.
Received on Fri Jan 21 2000 - 06:46:43 CST
