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I've always been curious about the characters in ASCII for this, but I've never seen them used in the wild. Stuff like "Group Separator" (0x1D), "Record Separat
by shabbyrobe 8y ago
I've always been curious about the characters in ASCII for this, but I've never seen them used in the wild. Stuff like "Group Separator" (0x1D), "Record Separator" (0x1E) or "Unit Separator" (0x1F)
Is there a reason why nobody uses these? Did someone work out back in the 90s they were pure evil and we've just never used them since?
- euos 8y agoThere’s no physical key for them. You can trivially write/edit CSV or TSV on any computer using any editor.
- mirimir 8y agoIndeed. I used to clean up data in UltraEdit. With the option for direct disk read/write set, there was virtually no file-size limit.
- GnarfGnarf 8y agoThe codes between x01 and x1F were designed for telecommunications, for instance binary custom formats over RS-232 or synchronous protocols. There is an excellent description in "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications" by Joe Campbell.
- mikestew 8y agohttps://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/ascii-characters.html https://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/ascii-characters.html Those codes were originally for just such a purpose, but as others point out there was a bootstrapping problem. At this point, if Excel doesn’t support it, it’s not going to gain traction.
- coredog64 8y agoAbout 10 years ago I had to use those for a financial system integration. I was getting files that had been created on a mainframe, and whoever wrote it originally had the foresight to use those characters. Probably because they were based out of EMEA and understood that commas weren’t useful across national borders.