Oh boy, having done data science work with government files, you remind me that they still use terrible delimiters. A white space delimiter sounds significantly worse than a tab delimited file, though!
I learned COBOL programming on that system. COBOL’s sequential file data type was all about space-delimited text files. Part of a program would define the various input & output files. For example a numerical userid might take up columns 1-8 then the first initial would be in column 10 then the last name in columns 12-20 and so on…
Tabs are considered white space. A white space is technically any character that is not visible. That covers things like spaces, vertical/horizontal tabs, non-breaking spaces, zero-length spaces, etc.
Oh boy, having done data science work with government files, you remind me that they still use terrible delimiters. A white space delimiter sounds significantly worse than a tab delimited file, though!
I learned COBOL programming on that system. COBOL’s sequential file data type was all about space-delimited text files. Part of a program would define the various input & output files. For example a numerical userid might take up columns 1-8 then the first initial would be in column 10 then the last name in columns 12-20 and so on…
Tabs are considered white space. A white space is technically any character that is not visible. That covers things like spaces, vertical/horizontal tabs, non-breaking spaces, zero-length spaces, etc.