On 15 Dec 99, at 18:15, WilliamJ. Patton, Jr. wrote:

> Hello, I am trying to  export a data base.  Could someone please
> explain comma, tab, and space delimited and the pros and cons of
> each.

  In your database, each "record" is composed of "fields"; the
program knows how it tells where each record ends and where the
fields are within them.  However, the program you want to import the
data into won't understand that; exporting is a process of arranging
the data so that some other system can import it -- figure out what's
a record and where the various fields are.
  The usual thing is for each exported record to appears as a text
"line", ending with a hard carriage-return.  The line will consist of
the vaues of the fields from that record, with some sort of separator
character between them -- this character is also called a "delimiter".

  Your source database is giving you a choice of three delimiter
characters.  Space is probably a poor choice; if you have a field
like "Street Address", there may be a varying number of space
characters within the field, and a delimiter cannot be used in the
data.
  Of the other two, I think TAB is more widely supported, and offers
some hope that the exported file may be almost as easy to read as an
actual report.  On the other hand, if you will be sending the
exported file over a connction that will expand tabs to appropriate
numbers of spaces, then COMMA would be a better choice.

David G

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