PEP 305 - CSV File API

[Jarek Zgoda]

Tyler Eaves <tyler at cg1.org> pisze:
 
> Now if it could only get some of the old COBOL guys to understand that when
> dealing with delimited files, padding fields isn't nessesary ;)

Not only COBOL programmers don't like files with delimited values...
Most of what my programs produce on PC is targeted at iSeries (AS/400)
machines, where RPG programs consume my files at night. Guys of RPG (we
call them "Role-Playing Gamers") do not accept the format other than
fixed field width.
When you try to save SQL query result from MS Query Analyzer or other
interactive SQL application, you nearly always have a possibility to
choose format of file - should it be comma-separated or fixed-width.
I tried to measure which file format needs less work and I found that
fixed-width is a bit faster, since you do not need to interprete string
from file, but just get slices and strip() them to get values.

-- 
Jarek Zgoda
http://www.zgoda.biz/