3 ms·

Absolutely. Everything comes with costs & benefits. But I'm not sure I've, in my entire 23-year professional programming career, ever encountered a fixed-width

by jerf 7y ago

Absolutely. Everything comes with costs & benefits. But I'm not sure I've, in my entire 23-year professional programming career, ever encountered a fixed-width text format in the wild. I've used cut even so for places where by coincidence the first couple of columns happened to be the same size, but that's really a hack. Obviously, other people have different experiences which is why I quality it so. (I only narrowly missed it at the beginning, but I started in webdev, and we never quite took direct feeds from the mainframes.) But I don't think it's too crazy to say UNIX shell, to the extent it can be pinned down at all, works most natively with variable-length line-by-line content.

buzer 7y ago
> But I'm not sure I've, in my entire 23-year professional programming career, ever encountered a fixed-width text format in the wild. SAP comes to mind. I think it does support various different formats, but for reason or another fixed-width seemed to be some kind of default value (that's what I usually got when I asked for SAP feed at least, but that was years ago).
btilly 7y ago
I can confirm that they are not a common problem. Admittedly I have encountered fixed-width text formats in the wild. But the last such occasion was about 15 years ago. (It was for interacting with a credit card processor to issue reward cards.)
F-0X 7y ago
Within my first year of professional development, I encountered several fixed-width files I needed to read and write. I suppose exposure depends a lot on the specific industry.
- hnick 7y ago
  Also big mainframe users (banks, insurance) often send fixed width data to us.
7thaccount 7y ago
Several scientific data formats in my industry have fixed width columns that traces back to the era of punch cards
zoom6628 7y ago
Some topics where you will most definitely come across fixed-width formats: - processing older system printouts that are save to text file - banking industry formats for payment files and statements - industrial machine control and my favourite....... - source code. My first intro to awk was using it to process COBOL code to find redundant copy libs, consolidate code, and generally cleanup code (very very crude linting). And it was brilliant. Fast, logical, readable, reliable - was everything i needed. It is also an eminently suitable language for teaching programming because it introduces the basic concept of SETUP - LOOP - END . which is exactly the same as one will find in most business systems, you find it in arduino sketches, hell you even find it in a browser which is basically just a whole universe of stuff sitting atop a very fast loop that looks for events. AWK fan for sure - my heirachy of languages these days would be cmd line where there is specific command doing all i need, AWK for anything needing to slice and dice records that dont contain blobs, python for complete programs, and python+nuitka or lazarus or C# when need speed and/or cross platform.

by jerf 7y ago

buzer 7y ago

> But I'm not sure I've, in my entire 23-year professional programming career, ever encountered a fixed-width text format in the wild. SAP comes to mind. I think it does support various different formats, but for reason or another fixed-width seemed to be some kind of default value (that's what I usually got when I asked for SAP feed at least, but that was years ago).

btilly 7y ago

I can confirm that they are not a common problem. Admittedly I have encountered fixed-width text formats in the wild. But the last such occasion was about 15 years ago. (It was for interacting with a credit card processor to issue reward cards.)

F-0X 7y ago

Within my first year of professional development, I encountered several fixed-width files I needed to read and write. I suppose exposure depends a lot on the specific industry.

hnick 7y ago
Also big mainframe users (banks, insurance) often send fixed width data to us.

7thaccount 7y ago

Several scientific data formats in my industry have fixed width columns that traces back to the era of punch cards

zoom6628 7y ago

Some topics where you will most definitely come across fixed-width formats: - processing older system printouts that are save to text file - banking industry formats for payment files and statements - industrial machine control and my favourite....... - source code. My first intro to awk was using it to process COBOL code to find redundant copy libs, consolidate code, and generally cleanup code (very very crude linting). And it was brilliant. Fast, logical, readable, reliable - was everything i needed. It is also an eminently suitable language for teaching programming because it introduces the basic concept of SETUP - LOOP - END . which is exactly the same as one will find in most business systems, you find it in arduino sketches, hell you even find it in a browser which is basically just a whole universe of stuff sitting atop a very fast loop that looks for events. AWK fan for sure - my heirachy of languages these days would be cmd line where there is specific command doing all i need, AWK for anything needing to slice and dice records that dont contain blobs, python for complete programs, and python+nuitka or lazarus or C# when need speed and/or cross platform.