Style Question

[Michael Doub]

I am working on a project that is going to manipulating records of data.  What is the best approach to identifying the individual components for use in different scripts?   

If the data was represented as some delimited string, then each item could be defined as a constant.  The question would then be how to manage these constants in multiple scripts.  I have not found any references to include files, which was my first thought.

if the data was represented in an array these solves the ability to reference the items easily enough but then I assume that you would have to create some special code to format the code in the correct order for consistent input or output ordering

I see when using SQL there is an option of identifying each data element separately, but if you use the array syntax you seem to have the same problem as a delimited string where you need to define constants to define element  numbers.

Can anyone provide any sage wisdom from the school of hard knocks?

Thanks
   Mike