Re^2: Thoughts on designing a file format.

[demerphq]

I prefer to use network line endings because that is the standard netowrk line ending, and because quite simply there will come a day when your file needs to be read by someone whos most advanced tool for reading it will be Excel. Likewise I tend to use csv so that cut and pasting from the file to an Excel workbook works correctly, not to mention the fact that for the type of data I use embedded tabs are never a problem, but occasionally embedded commas are.

[greenFox]

I'm missing something here. On DOS if you write print FILE "some text\n"; you will get "\r\n" in the file. If you do the same thing on Unix you get just "\n". What are you outputing? Are you setting $INPUT_RECORD_SEPERATOR and $OUTPUT_RECORD_SEPERATOR to something other than default? Otherwise chomp is going to break for example, it will remove "\r\n" on DOS and just "\n" on Unix leaving a "\r" at the end of every line. It seems like a lot of trouble to deal with something that ftp clients do automatically... if I copy your program and data file over to Unix I have to then change the line endings back to CR/LF before it works???