Dear folks,
Recently I stumbled upon a nice feature of the token format that I
feel people may like. It is somewhat 'undocumented', and perhaps
could be made more clear in the Vee documentation.
We all note that the choices for reading from a token format seem
inadequate. We ask: What if I want to use tab seperation? My data
may contain whitespace (Like in text-sentances) that I DON'T want
seperated apart. The selection for token seperator only has <space>
and the exclude and include character choices. BUT, there is a lot
more power there than meets the eye. What the Vee help file does not
do a good job explaining is that IF the fields of your file are
quotation encapsulated, then Vee does not seperate token fields by the
<space> while within the quoted field.
We think there is a problem: here's an example of what we may wish to
read from a file. It contains: <int> <int> <comment>
Your file has one line: 8 7 That is all
Would Vee read in the tokens as: 8,7,That,Is,All
YES, it would.
But if your file has the following:
"8" "7" "That is all"
Then Vee , very smartly, reads in: 8,7, That Is All
(the commas are my way of denoting each element of an array. Vee
returns an array from the token format transactions.
What do I feel was undocumented: I feel that the Vee documentation
does not clearly enough point out that the quotations around a set of
data allow the data to contain spaces. This makes the token format
VERY useful since I don't have to worry about white-space messing up
the token-parsing.
The complement to this is to write To-String in a "quoted string
format". Pass in an array of strings and Vee automatically writes one
line of text with quotations around each index of the array, with a
space between each of these 'fields'.
In closing:
Using this formatting, I found my file I/O to be a lot more slick, and
faster than doing a lot of string parsing.
Also, Microsoft's frontpage has the space seperated spreadsheet format
for storing data from a form (with quotation encapsulated fields) for
those of you who have your Vee programs linked to some input file from
a web-page.)
Thanks for reading my rambling,
Andrew Hamilton
andrew_hamilton@hp.com
(Not affiliated with the Vee team)
Recently I stumbled upon a nice feature of the token format that I
feel people may like. It is somewhat 'undocumented', and perhaps
could be made more clear in the Vee documentation.
We all note that the choices for reading from a token format seem
inadequate. We ask: What if I want to use tab seperation? My data
may contain whitespace (Like in text-sentances) that I DON'T want
seperated apart. The selection for token seperator only has <space>
and the exclude and include character choices. BUT, there is a lot
more power there than meets the eye. What the Vee help file does not
do a good job explaining is that IF the fields of your file are
quotation encapsulated, then Vee does not seperate token fields by the
<space> while within the quoted field.
We think there is a problem: here's an example of what we may wish to
read from a file. It contains: <int> <int> <comment>
Your file has one line: 8 7 That is all
Would Vee read in the tokens as: 8,7,That,Is,All
YES, it would.
But if your file has the following:
"8" "7" "That is all"
Then Vee , very smartly, reads in: 8,7, That Is All
(the commas are my way of denoting each element of an array. Vee
returns an array from the token format transactions.
What do I feel was undocumented: I feel that the Vee documentation
does not clearly enough point out that the quotations around a set of
data allow the data to contain spaces. This makes the token format
VERY useful since I don't have to worry about white-space messing up
the token-parsing.
The complement to this is to write To-String in a "quoted string
format". Pass in an array of strings and Vee automatically writes one
line of text with quotations around each index of the array, with a
space between each of these 'fields'.
In closing:
Using this formatting, I found my file I/O to be a lot more slick, and
faster than doing a lot of string parsing.
Also, Microsoft's frontpage has the space seperated spreadsheet format
for storing data from a form (with quotation encapsulated fields) for
those of you who have your Vee programs linked to some input file from
a web-page.)
Thanks for reading my rambling,
Andrew Hamilton
andrew_hamilton@hp.com
(Not affiliated with the Vee team)