SPUG: Stupid Ascii question

[dancerboy]

At 10:30 AM -0700 8/15/02, Dan Ebert wrote:
>I have often used a separator like :::: (four colons), since the chances
>of that occuring in the data fields I wanted to parse was slim to none.
>That way you wouldn't have to worry about using non-printable chars.  It
>does take up more bytes than a single char though.

<AMUSING-ANECDOTE><!-- kids, don't try this at home...  --!>

Once, when coding a web-based job-listing database application, I and 
the DB designer solved this problem by making the record delimiter be 
"<corporate whore>" -- since the chances of the string "<corporate 
whore>" showing up in any of our job listings was, naturally, exactly 
nil.

This was, of course, a searchable database, and for speed searching 
was done on the raw (un-split) records.  This had the interesting 
side-effect that doing a search for "corporate whore" would return 
every single job listing in the database.  We considered this a 
"feature"  ;)

</AMUSING-ANECDOTE>

-jason

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