[ANN] Text-file DBs

[Paul Looney]

Kay,

I do mention the different ways different OSes handle the CR/LF/CRLF. Going further than that is definitely beyond the scope of the work - and, to be honest, beyond my ability.

I can see where Unicode (non-ASCII characters) would be important to users of non-Roman languages (BTW, one of my favorite professors was James Heisig, SVD who wrote the series of books “Remembering Kanji”, volumes 1 to 3). I firmly believe that a database should contain as little “formatting" as possible - its purpose is to contain “data”. For our very much “Western”/“Roman” data we need nothing beyond ASCII - with only three formatting characters. There is no intrinsic reason that a text-file could not support Unicode data - but, for our use, that would make it much larger: slower to open, slower to search, slower to save, slower to copy, etc. 

I will release the current work under a Creative Commons license - so wiser and more knowledgeable people can edit and add to it. Your suggestion would be a nice addition.

Chapter XVIII in the current work will be “Using Sockets to communicate with Text Files”.

Paul Looney




> On Nov 6, 2015, at 3:51 PM, Kay C Lan <lan.kc.macmail at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 1:57 AM, Paul Looney <simplsol at aol.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Here are the chapters (let me know if I missed something, I almost forgot
>> to have a chapter on CSV - a subject about which I have strong feelings):
>> 
>> Paul,
> 
> I don't wish to 'add the straw' on what clearly is a very large
> undertaking, but from a recent thread here I would suggest a topic on
> unicode and char sets. For anyone new to DBs, not just LC + DBs,
> understanding what char set an old DB is using, or what char set to create
> a new DB in and how to handle all the situations in between is a hurdle
> that has to be crossed particularly if their intended stack is to be
> cross-platform. Maybe:
> 
> XVIII. Handling Cross-Platform and non-ASCII characters
> 
> Good luck and look forward to it's completion.
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