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Re: OT: Collecting data in text files



On Mon, 27 Aug 2001 12:29:17 PDT, Abner Gershon writes:
<...>
>I currently collect lists of information on many
>topics such as restaurants, phone lists, file folders,
>slides using a database program, Lotus approach. Since
>I am the only user of this information I thought I
>could record this information in text files using vim
>and then use gawk and sed to access this data.
>
>I have done a little reading on how these programs
>work and would like to know if it is generally better
>to seperate columns with spaces or tabs for this
>purpose and if this would be the most appropriate
>technique for collecting and organizing such data.

Spaces. I strongly recomend spaces. Better yet would be ";" or "," but 
 if your options are spaces or tabs, go for spaces.

Why?

You can do `sed s/"\ "/"something"/` but I could not figure out a way
 to do the same for tabs (tabs only, I know of [[:space:]] et al).

cheers,
&rw
-- 
-- Actually, we have scientifically determined that Heisenberg did indeed
-- sleep exactly here. However, we have no idea whatsoever just how fast
-- asleep he was.                                         -- Dave Aronson
----


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