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Comment on ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or Tab Delimited Text

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I like this format best of all, CSV is # 2 favorite.

At work we settled on using ^G (0x07) as a delimiter instead of TABs for file transfers and loading data into various databases.

The reason was Excel. People/systems who create these files sometimes source from Excel. And Excel can have a habit of placing odd characters in text fields. We found the one character never encountered was BEL.

For text fields we tend to remove embedded white space and after replacing TABs with 1 space.

This sounds like a noisy format.

Silently ignore it.

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