Re: Using CPYFRMIMPF

On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 8:02 PM Roger Harman <roger.harman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If it were properly escaped, it would be a non-issue. However, most any printable character could be possible in the "real" data.

I don't understand the second sentence in relation to the first. I
mean, both statements are plainly true, but why the "however" there?

That's why I prefer *TAB delimited or fixed width. It's pretty hard to screw those up.

But Excel does something most people would not expect with tab
delimiters, which might count as screwing it up. And since lots of
people use Excel, I would say it's pretty darn easy to screw up
tab-delimited files.

Fixed width has the problem of whether you are talking about
characters or bytes. In today's UTF-8-dominated world, each character
has a variable number of bytes.

This is why *I* say: people should stop rolling their own. Yes, you
can come up with a "technically superior" scheme than Excel or whoever
else. That doesn't mean other people will adhere to it, especially if
it means they have to roll their own to do it.

John Y.